A Practical FinOps Playbook for AI Infrastructure Costs
Somewhere this quarter, a team spun up a cluster of GPU instances for a training run, left them running over a long weekend because nobody wrote down whose job it was to tear them down, and walked into Monday with a bill that made someone's stomach drop. That scenario used to be a rounding error. It isn't anymore. According to the FinOps Foundation's sixth annual State of FinOps report — 1,192 respondents managing more than $83 billion in annual cloud spend — 73% of organizations exceeded their AI budget in the past year, and only 20% forecast their AI spend within ±10% of what it actually came to. GPU utilization, across the same survey base, sits at 15–30%. That's not a rounding error. That's paying full price for a resource you're using at roughly a fifth of its capacity, at scale, across an entire fleet.
The thesis here isn't "AI...
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