👨🍳 Community Friday: FinOps for AI Certification — Your Kitchen Needs New Skills
The FinOps Foundation just announced something our community has been asking for: a dedicated certification track for AI cost management.
Why AI Needs Its Own Certification
Traditional FinOps skills don't fully translate to AI workloads. Here's the challenge:
GPU Economics Are Different
- • Compute costs can be 10-100x traditional workloads
- • Utilization patterns are bursty and unpredictable
- • Reserved capacity commitments require different calculations
Training vs. Inference
- • Training is batch, high-cost, infrequent
- • Inference is continuous, variable, scales with users
- • Each requires different optimization strategies
The Hidden Costs
- • Data storage for training sets
- • Experiment tracking and versioning
- • Model serving infrastructure
What the Certification Covers
The FinOps Foundation is releasing content in stages:
Phase 1 (Available Now)
Fundamentals of AI spend visibility
Phase 2 (Q1 2026)
GPU optimization strategies
Phase 3 (March 2026)
Full certification exam
💡 You earn badges as you progress, building toward the complete certification.
Why This Matters for Your Career
Organizations are pouring money into AI without clear cost accountability. The FinOps practitioners who understand AI economics will be invaluable:
of AI projects exceed budget due to infrastructure costs
GPU spend is the fastest-growing category in most cloud bills
people understand the intersection of ML operations and cost management
Chef's Career Tip
Don't wait for March 2026. Start learning now:
1. Understand GPU instance types across AWS, Azure, GCP
2. Learn how spot/preemptible instances work for training
3. Study inference cost models (per-token, per-request, batch)
4. Get familiar with ML-specific tools: SageMaker, Vertex AI, Azure ML
The organizations building AI capabilities need cost chefs who speak the language of machine learning.
Your kitchen is expanding. Time to add new recipes.
🍲 Dive into the full recipe at cloudcostchefs.com
Get comprehensive guides on AI cost optimization, GPU management, and career development in FinOps.
CloudCostChefs: Your guide to mastering AI cost optimization and advancing your FinOps career. From GPU economics to ML infrastructure, we've got you covered.