Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Why 5% utilisation is normal — and why it shouldn't be The figure seems almost impossible. Enterprises have collectively committed hundreds of billions of dollars to GPU infrastructure — H100 clusters, reserved cloud instances, co-location racks — yet the average utilisation rate across the installed base sits at roughly 5%, according to VentureBeat's analysis of GPU cloud market data. The "$401B problem" framing from that analysis is blunt but accurate: if your hardware is busy 5% of the time, 95% of your capital expenditure is producing nothing. To understand why this happened, it helps to trace the decision chain. In 2023 and 2024, the fear of missing out on AI was genuinely rational. GPU lead times stretched to six months. NVIDIA allocations required executive relationships.…
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