Colleges and universities are reshaping cloud strategies as artificial intelligence workloads move beyond research into admissions, advising and campus services. IT leaders from multiple institutions say AI demand is forcing decisions about where to run models, how to secure sensitive student data, and who governs vendor relationships. The shift elevates cloud governance, data residency and contractual controls as immediate priorities for CIOs. The coverage cites campus technology teams and industry analysts noting that decisions once framed as "cloud first" are now being evaluated against latency, cost and compliance for AI inference workloads. Institutions are drafting new policies to classify AI use cases and set approval pathways for third-party models. Clarification: "inference" refers to running pre-trained AI models to produce outputs for users, a compute phase distinct from model training.