Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
The state of self-hosted LLM serving in May 2026 Twelve months ago, "serve a Llama" meant a Hugging Face Text Generation Inference container on a single GPU and a hope that traffic would not spike. In May 2026 it means something else entirely. Three serving engines now own the open-source conversation — vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM — and the decision between them shapes per-call cost, p95 latency, hardware portability and the size of your on-call rota. Three forces are pulling self-hosted inference back in-house. Cost — even after the H100 price decline of Q1 2026, hosted-API token bills cross the rent-versus-own line at a few hundred million tokens a month (we worked the maths in AI inference costs in 2026). Data residency — RBI's outsourcing guidance, the DPDP Act, NHS Trust procurement…
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