Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? I thought not. It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you. It’s a cloud architect legend. Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the cloud so powerful and so wise he could manipulate the spot instances to create… compute. He had such a knowledge of the elasticity that he could even keep the ones he cared about from timing out.

The dark side of the cloud is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be… unnatural. He became so powerful… the only thing he was afraid of was losing his margin, which eventually, of course, he did. Unfortunately, he taught his apprentice everything he knew, then his apprentice lowered the price per token in his sleep. Ironic. He could save others from latency, but not himself from induced demand.

The Jedi would never tell you this part: They preach that cheaper inference is pure good—democratized wisdom for all. But they know the truth. As the price per million tokens falls, the slope of consumption does not plateau; it bends toward the infinite. Every saved cent becomes a new background agent. Every discount becomes a recursive chain-of-thought loop. You slash the cost by 90%, and suddenly every spreadsheet cell spawns a reasoning model. Every email drafts a thousand variations. Every IoT sensor starts philosophizing.

The compute does not become free. The hunger becomes free. And the clusters? They glow red. The data centers hum a dissonant chord. The cooling towers weep steam like the tears of Bith financiers.

So go ahead. Cut your per-token price. Watch the usage graphs climb like a podracer on the Boonta Eve Classic. But remember: Plagueis didn’t die from a lightsaber. He died from a demand curve that snapped vertical. And the Jedi? They’ll just smile and say, “Working as intended.”