Let’s be clear: the cloud isn’t dying. But the age of unquestioned cloud supremacy  — that decade-long reign where every ounce of intelligence had to pass through someone else’s API — that’s beginning to crack. We’re entering the post-imperial  phase of compute. The Great Inversion For twenty years, the cloud has been the empire of cognition: centralized, industrial, and rented by the teraflop. It made sense. The economics of scale were brutal. Training frontier models requir