Report: Utilization Of Kubernetes Infrastructure Remains Abysmal
Cloud Native Now, Tuesday, April 21st, 2026
CAST AI analysis reveals Kubernetes clusters have just 8% CPU utilization and 5% GPU utilization, worsening from previous year.
A CAST AI report on tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters deployed on cloud services shows that average CPU utilization stood at only 8% in 2025, with memory utilization at 20% and GPU utilization at just 5%.
The analysis indicates that utilization rates have actually worsened compared to 2024, with CPU overprovisioning reaching 69% and memory overprovisioning at 79%. The waste is attributed to a tendency to overprovision resources and failure to revisit deployments to optimize for changing workloads, with IT teams using autonomous optimization seeing approximately 50% reductions in CPU footprint.
As cloud infrastructure costs rise and GPU pricing increases, organizations face pressure to adopt automation frameworks to rightsize Kubernetes clusters and improve resource utilization.