EKS Powers the Cloud's Largest Kubernetes Fleets – So Why Is It Still Running Mostly Idle?
Cloud Native Now, Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026
Kubernetes report data shows EKS GPU utilization averages 5%, as autoscalers like Karpenter provision capacity for padded resource requests.
This Cloud Native Now feature draws on the 2026 State of Kubernetes Optimization Report, which measured production clusters across AWS, Azure and GCP.
Average CPU utilization fell from 10% to 8% in 2025 and memory from 23% to 20%, while CPU overprovisioning rose from 40% to 69% and memory overprovisioning reached 79%.
Average GPU utilization was 5% fleet-wide and on Amazon EKS.
The article explains that Karpenter, like any Kubernetes autoscaler, provisions EC2 capacity based on requested resources rather than actual consumption, so engineers who pad requests to avoid throttling or out-of-memory evictions drive up idle capacity.