AI bubble update: 79% of companies say their GPUs sit idle at least half the time, yet most plan new AI platforms

VentureBeat · Matt Marshall · 2026-10-23 17:05 UTC

Enterprise AI demand is real, but it’s landing on frontier models, not the GPUs companies already hold. The next savings are in tokens, context and agents.

Most surveyed companies running AI in production say the GPUs they use sit idle at least half the time, and most of those companies plan to add or switch AI compute platforms anyway, according to the latest data from VentureBeat Intelligence.

A whopping 79% of the 218 respondents who reported GPU utilization said their GPUs are busy half the time or less, across three monthly VB Pulse surveys from July through September. Among those companies, 70% said they plan to adopt a new, additional or replacement AI compute platform within the next 12 months. The share with idle GPUs held between 77% and 81% in each of the three months. We reported the September results Thursday; the three months of data show the pattern holding steady.

Those numbers matter because Wall Street is arguing over whether AI is a bubble. On October 13, the International Monetary Fund warned that a sharp fall in AI share prices could threaten global financial stability. Most of that argument has focused on the companies selling AI compute, such as Nvidia, cloud giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services, and specialized GPU clouds like CoreWeave, and on whether they are building more capacity than their customers will pay for. We looked at what those customers are actually doing.

Read the full story at VentureBeat · All coverage of this story