The reason is straightforward: demand for compute, largely driven by AI workloads, is outpacing supply, and engineers requesting new CPU capacity are now waiting days to get it. Engineers have been given deadlines to identify and reduce idle EC2 instances, a category that reportedly accounts for roughly 65% of all running instances being underutilized. But CPU capacity getting tight at AWS is a newer development, and it suggests the strain is spreading beyond the GPU clusters that get most of the attention. What this means for cloud customers and the broader marketFor companies running workloads on AWS, internal capacity strain at the provider level can surface in several ways. The enterprise customers most likely to feel the impact are those running resource-intensive applications without reserved capacity commitments.