#ANN search

A vertical PDU bank of individually metered outlets in a bright metering room with a handheld clamp meter caught closing around one branch cable, a storage array and a capacity-planning bench visible beyond

The Hidden Infrastructure Bill Behind Every RAG Answer

Retrieval is sold as a cheap fix for a model that does not know your data. Embedding compute, vector storage, ANN queries, reranking, and index freshness are five separate meters running underneath it, and none of them appear in the price of the model call.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 11, 2026 · 18 min read

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