Briefs · IV · Ideatives Inc. · Updated
Cost is a design decision.
Organizations estimate that 29% of their cloud spend is wasted, according to Flexera's State of the Cloud 2026 report (753 respondents, self-estimates), up from 27% in 2024 and 2025 and below the 2022 peak of 32%.
Flexera State of the Cloud, 2026 · 753 respondents
In this brief
How much cloud spend is wasted?
Respondents to Flexera's State of the Cloud survey have estimated 27–32% of their cloud spend as wasted every year since 2020; the 2026 figure is 29% (self-estimates, vendor survey).
Show data table
| Report year | Wasted share (self-estimate) |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 30% |
| 2021 | 30% |
| 2022 | 32% |
| 2023 | 28% |
| 2024 | 27% |
| 2025 | 27% |
| 2026 | 29% |
Download CSV · compiled by Ideatives Inc. from the source above, CC BY 4.0; source figures under the source's terms
Where it goes
10%
Average CPU use across Kubernetes clusters, down from 13% the year before.
Cast AI Kubernetes Cost Benchmark, 2025
Half
Of AWS data transfer costs, on average, are traffic between availability zones. 98% of organizations Datadog studied pay it.
Datadog State of Cloud Costs, 2024
98%
Of FinOps teams now manage AI spend, up from 63% in 2025 and 31% in 2024.
FinOps Foundation, State of FinOps 2026
Decided early, seen late
Decided
Service choice
AWS rates skipping cost analysis of every workload component a high risk.
AWS Well-Architected, COST05-BP02
Decided
Sizing
Clusters overprovisioned and managed by hand: 10% average CPU.
Cast AI, 2025
Decided
Placement
Data flow sets the transfer bill. Half of it is cross-zone.
Datadog, 2024
Seen
Bill
The cost appears as a line item after the decision has shipped.
Seen
FinOps review
Pre-deployment architecture costing is the #2 tool feature practitioners say doesn't exist yet.
State of FinOps, 2026
Ideatives’ view: decisions made earlier fix more of the bill. No study found measures this by stage.
What to do
- Put a cost estimate in every design review.
- Set requests and placement from measured use. Track idle and cross-zone traffic as named metrics.
- Give AI, GPUs and observability their own budget line and unit cost from day one.
Questions
What percentage of cloud spend is wasted?
Respondents to Flexera's State of the Cloud 2026 estimate 29% of their cloud spend is wasted. The figure has been 27–32% every year since 2020.
What is average Kubernetes CPU utilization?
10% across clusters in Cast AI's 2025 Kubernetes Cost Benchmark (vendor telemetry, 2,100+ organizations), down from 13% the year before.
How much of AWS data transfer cost is cross-zone traffic?
About half on average, per Datadog's 2024 State of Cloud Costs (vendor telemetry, AWS only). 98% of the organizations studied pay it.
Sources
- Flexera, State of the Cloud Report, 2020–2026 editions. Vendor; respondent self-estimates.
- FinOps Foundation, State of FinOps 2026. 1,192 respondents.
- Datadog, State of Cloud Costs, June 2024. Vendor telemetry, AWS only.
- Cast AI, Kubernetes Cost Benchmark, March 2025. Vendor telemetry, 2,100+ organizations.
- AWS Well-Architected, Cost Optimization Pillar, June 2024.
- Grafana Labs, Observability Survey 2025: observability averages 17% of compute spend (most common answer 10%; 294 responses).
Licenses and reuse
Ideatives’ work is licensed below. Figures from each source remain under that source's terms; each is cited with attribution.
- Ideatives Inc.: text, charts and data compilations on this page, excluding quotations and source figures, CC BY 4.0. Credit "Ideatives Inc." with a link to this page.
- Amazon Web Services: All rights reserved; cited with attribution
- Cast AI: Terms not stated; cited with attribution
- Datadog: CC BY-ND 4.0
- FinOps Foundation: CC BY 4.0
- Flexera: CC BY 4.0
- Grafana Labs: All rights reserved; cited with attribution