If you’re running 1,000 high-performance instances and each costs a buck an hour, that’s $720,000 a month, but you are probably only using about $93,600 worth of computing. The rest is just expensive digital decoration. But wait, it gets worse. You’re not just wasting money on unused compute and storage; you’re also paying for cooling, power, management, and software licenses for capacity that is sitting there collecting digital dust. Cloud providers are not charities. They’re passing that cost on to you. That wasted capital could be funding innovation, driving competitive advantage, or just making your shareholders happier. Overprovisioning is masking more profound problems in your architecture.
I’ve been in this game long enough to know that cloud computing is supposed to be your competitive advantage, not your financial anchor. Right now, for most enterprises, it’s the latter. Until enterprises get serious about tackling this waste, the promise of cloud economics will remain just that—a promise.
Numbers don’t lie, but people lie about numbers
In 2023 alone, cloud providers deployed 878,000 accelerators that generated seven million GPU hours of work, resulting in approximately $5.8 billion in revenue. These numbers mask a troubling inefficiency. The revenue figures would significantly increase if these resources were utilized more effectively.
