Owned Or Rented: One Infrastructure Decision To Rule The Modern AdTech

InnovationOwned Or Rented: One Infrastructure Decision To Rule The Modern AdTechByBoris Abaev,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 11, 2026, 06:00am EDTBoris Abaev is CEO of Bidease, an AdTech startup on a mission to bring fully transparent, value-driven advertising to the mobile world. getty​For over a decade, cloud infrastructure has been a go-to for tech companies, and for a good reason: AWS, Google Cloud and Azure made scaling accessible, lowered capital requirements and shortened the time to market. According to Synergy Research Group, the global cloud infrastructure services market reached more than $300 billion in 2024, growing by roughly 20% year over year.For most software businesses, cloud is still the right call, but for some industries—programmatic advertising in particular—things get more complicated. I have spent over a decade building and running a mobile DSP, and today I want to share one of the most underrated infrastructure decisions in AdTech: when (and why) to consider owning your stack instead of renting it.Cloudy With A Chance Of PainWhen we were building Bidease in the late 2010s, the cloud was the only sensible option. Capital was expensive, and deployment had to be fast. We needed to ship a DSP, not run a data center. I would make the same call again today.The problem lies with the nature of programmatic advertising. Every bid request must be answered within 20 milliseconds. Every element we add—fraud filtering, supply-side scoring, ML model outputs—makes maintaining that latency more expensive. To preserve our margin, any increase in infrastructure costs ultimately means higher prices for customers.In my experience, the infrastructure costs of cloud-hosted DSPs typically account for around 40% of their revenue. This is not about specific companies; it is an inherent feature of pro...