The Inference Tax: How Prefix-Aware Routing Eliminates the Hidden Cost of LLMs at Scale

DigitalOcean's DigitalOcean Inference Gateway optimizes prefix-aware routing and caching for vLLM models on AMD Instinct MI325X GPUs and NVIDIA Hopper, reducing compute costs by 4x or more per request. Prefix caching skips redundant computation, saving 350ms of prefill work per cache hit.