Blog · Costs
Companies estimate that nearly three in ten cloud dollars are wasted, and AI is making it worse
Flexera's State of the Cloud 2026 report, drawn from a survey of 753 cloud decision-makers, puts wasted spend at 29%, according to the respondents' own estimates. It's the first increase in five years, and Flexera attributes it to the growth of AI workloads. Before asking for more budget, it's worth knowing how much of the current one serves no one.
What the report says
Flexera published the fifteenth edition of its report on March 18, 2026. Generative AI usage rose from 50% to 58%, and it's now the third most used public cloud service. Organizations are rolling it out quickly, but with three problems in plain sight: security and compliance risks, data quality, and the difficulty of forecasting consumption that doesn't follow a pattern.
Spending is growing too: 76% of the large enterprises surveyed spend more than $5 million a month on public cloud. With more spending and more waste at the same time, the report concludes that centralized governance and FinOps discipline are no longer optional.
Why does AI add waste?
According to Flexera, these workloads behave differently from traditional services and make visibility, governance, and financial control harder. In practice, an experiment nobody shuts down or consumption nobody can predict ends up on the bill without anyone having decided it.
At the same time, companies are changing how they measure the cloud: 64% use the value that reaches business units as their main metric, twelve points more than the previous year, and 49% measure unit cost, up from 40% before. Measuring value without measuring waste leaves half the picture out.
What organizations are doing
Among respondents, 71% have a cloud center of excellence or an equivalent, and 63% have a FinOps team. Post-migration cost optimization dropped from third to fifth place among migration challenges: more and more teams think about cost before moving a workload, not after.