Almost everyone agrees a large slice of cloud spend is wasted, and almost no one can point to exactly where. This report shows where the idle third of your bill actually hides, which workloads leak the most, and the specific moves that recover it, framed for the people who sign the invoice.
Dev, test, and staging left running nights and weekends bill for hours nobody uses. Among the highest-return, lowest-risk recoveries, and frequently overlooked.
Databases and Containers
Unattached volumes, cold data in hot tiers, oversized database instances, and requested-but-unused container resources. Compute is the only category most teams have optimized. These are largely untouched.
the New Frontier
GenAI in production jumped from 47% to 81% in two years, arriving with early-cloud-era freedom and little governance. Idle GPUs waste money far faster than idle VMs, which is exactly why waste turned back up.
You can't reclaim what you can't see, and lack of visibility is the #1 obstacle. Map spend to workloads and owners before anything else.
Turn dev, test, and staging off outside working hours, usually the fastest meaningful saving available, at almost no risk.
Reclaim unattached storage and cold data, right-size oversized databases, and trim container resource requests, the areas FinOps data shows are under-optimized.
Apply cost controls and idle-GPU teardown before AI becomes the dominant line item, and make spend visible to the teams that create it so waste doesn't regrow.
Flexera's 2026 estimate is 29%, up for the first time in five years because of AI workloads. Historically it peaked around 30 to 32%. The "roughly a third wasted" rule of thumb is close to accurate again.
Usually scheduling non-production environments off outside working hours, which is high return and low risk, followed by reclaiming unattached storage and right-sizing oversized databases and containers.
AI. GenAI moved rapidly into production, and GPU and AI spend is arriving with little cost governance, the same unbounded experimentation that marked the early cloud era, on far more expensive hardware.
Because visibility is the core obstacle. Most organizations can't cleanly map spend to workloads and owners, and 53% name that as the top blocker. Getting visibility is the prerequisite for every other fix.
CFOs, FinOps leaders, and VPs of Infrastructure trying to recover wasted cloud spend without cutting into what delivers value.
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