Azul Report: Cloud Costs Rise as AI Strains Budgets

The AI revolution has a massive, uninvited guest at the table: a skyrocketing cloud bill that 88% of CFOs say is only getting bigger.

A new report released today by Azul reveals a growing “financial tension” inside the C-suite. Finance leaders are desperate to pour money into AI, but they are finding that the very technology they need to grow is being choked by inefficient cloud spending.

Cloud costs become board-level concern as executives see costs rise

Cloud costs used to be a headache hidden away in the IT department, but those days are over. According to the survey of 300 US finance leaders, 66% now say cloud spending has officially become a “board-level concern.”

It’s easy to see why. Nearly 9 in 10 organizations are seeing their cloud costs climb, with a third describing the increase as “significant”. 

Only a tiny nine percent of companies have managed to keep their spending flat. For most, the cloud has transformed from a flexible utility into a strategic risk that demands executive oversight.

The AI paradox: investing in technology without additional budget

There is a bit of a “catch-22” happening with AI. While 56% of CFOs name investing in AI and automation as their number one financial priority for the year, the technology itself is making their budgets harder to manage.

About 43% of leaders admit that adopting AI is adding new layers of “workload complexity,” which makes it much harder to forecast and control what they are actually spending.

To fund these AI dreams without breaking the bank, CFOs are starting to look at their current cloud setups with a more critical eye. The report found that:

• Widespread inefficiency: 69% of finance leaders believe that 10% to 30% of their current cloud spend is essentially wasted.
• The complexity barrier: The biggest hurdle to fixing this is the “complexity of cloud pricing,” cited by 45% of respondents.
• Visibility gaps: 32% of CFOs say they lack sufficient visibility into how their teams use resources.

Rather than just cutting costs for the sake of it, 45% of CFOs see cloud optimization as a way to create “budget flexibility” to fund the next wave of digital innovation.

Turning to deeper technical levers for savings

While many companies use basic tools like AWS Cost Explorer, a smaller, more tech-savvy group is digging deeper into how their software actually runs. About 16% of organizations are now using “Java runtime optimization or JVM tuning” to make their applications more efficient at the source. 

Other popular moves include re-platforming legacy systems (24%) and rightsizing their infrastructure (35%).

Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO of Azul, noted in the release that this shift is about more than just saving pennies.

“With nearly nine in ten CFOs seeing cloud costs rise and AI now a top investment priority, finance leaders are being forced to rethink how efficiently their applications consume cloud resources,” Sellers said. 

“Cloud optimization has become a strategic lever — one that allows organizations to fund AI innovation, protect margins, and bring greater predictability and accountability to cloud investments.”

As cloud complexity grows, the report concludes that the CFO is no longer just funding cloud transformation but is now a key stakeholder in shaping it, ensuring that every dollar spent in the cloud drives measurable business value.