Should your edge AI inference run on a DGX Spark or stay on cloud APIs? Anyone who’s run the numbers knows the sticker price is the easy part—the hidden 80% is engineering debt: quantization, inference framework choice, thermals, ops, cross-node RDMA. Cloud is rent; owning GPUs is a mortgage plus renovation. Three self-assessment questions to decide if your workload deserves on-prem—daily token volume, latency sensitivity, model iteration cadence—and how to compute break-even without getting fooled by the GPU spec sheet.