AWS customers waste 25-35% on cloud

Cloud waste is still a live problem: Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud report says organizations estimate 29% of their infrastructure and platform cloud spend is wasted. (flexera.com) That figure matters because it reverses a five-year decline in wasted cloud spend, according to Flexera’s latest survey of 753 cloud decision-makers and users. (flexera.com) (learn.flexera.com) The same report says 84% of organizations struggle to manage cloud spend, and cloud budgets had already exceeded limits by 17% in Flexera’s 2025 survey. (flexera.com 1) (flexera.com 2) The waste number is not an AWS-only metric. Flexera measures estimated wasted spend across infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, which covers the big public cloud providers enterprises use. (learn.flexera.com) FinOps, the discipline companies use to track and optimize technology bills, is also changing shape. The FinOps Foundation’s 2026 report says 98% of respondents now manage artificial intelligence spend, up from 31% two years earlier. (finops.org) That same FinOps Foundation report says teams are moving beyond cloud into software-as-a-service, licensing, private cloud and data center costs. It says practitioners with executive alignment have two to four times more influence over technology selection decisions. (finops.org) The result is a more crowded cost playbook than simple “turn off idle servers.” Flexera says fewer than half of organizations use any one commitment discount per cloud provider, even though those discounts are a standard way to lower bills. (flexera.com) Amazon Web Services is arguing the answer is optimization inside its own platform. In a September 22, 2025 post, AWS said a General Services Administration agreement could deliver up to $1 billion in savings for federal agencies and cited a Hackett Group study showing average 20% infrastructure cost reductions for organizations migrating to AWS. (aws.amazon.com) Alternative compute vendors are making a different pitch: leave the hyperscalers for some workloads. io.net says its GPU cloud is “70% cheaper than AWS” and advertises H100 instances from $1.85 an hour versus $12.29 an hour on AWS, though those claims come from the company itself. (io.net) The bigger shift is that cloud cost control is no longer just about trimming waste after the fact. The FinOps Foundation says optimization remains important, but governance, forecasting and technology-wide cost management now outweigh optimization alone. (finops.org)