CNC spindle bearings fail in 200ms but cloud anomaly detection round-trip takes 400ms

CNC mill spindle bearings exhibit vibration signature changes 100-300ms before catastrophic failure, but cloud-based anomaly detection requires 400-600ms round-trip (sensor to cloud API to response), meaning the alert arrives after the $50,000 spindle is already destroyed. A single undetected spindle crash halts the production line for 8-12 hours while the spindle is replaced, costing a mid-size shop $15,000-$40,000 in lost production on top of the part cost. Cloud API models cannot solve this because the physics of network latency are immutable -- even with 5G, the serialization, transmission, inference, and return path exceeds the failure window. An on-device model like Gemma 4 E2B running on a vibration sensor gateway processes accelerometer data in under 5ms and triggers an emergency spindle stop before the bearing seizes, because the inference happens on the same board that reads the sensor.