UK businesses spend £3.8 billion a year more than expected on technology infrastructure, according to research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) commissioned by cloud storage provider Wasabi Technologies. CEBR attributes the figure to provider charges that are opaque, unpredictable or hard to forecast, rather than to firms' own planned usage. Global overspend across the eight countries studied reaches £47.4 billion ($63.4 billion).
AI and machine learning infrastructure is the largest single source in the UK, at £1.2 billion or 32% of the total. It is also the hardest category to forecast: 22% of British businesses call AI infrastructure costs unpredictable, more than for any other layer of the stack. Among UK firms reporting an AI overspend, 36% cited higher than expected token, inference or usage-based charges, 66% cited AI platform and model licensing fees and 43% cited integration, deployment and model operations costs.
The overruns change what gets funded. Some 77% of UK organisations made at least one cost-driven trade-off in the past year. Hiring in technology, data and AI roles was the most common casualty (38%), ahead of technology and software investment (37%) and training and workforce development (34%). Among global businesses facing unpredictable costs, 73% reported budget pressure, and 36% of those had delayed or scaled back AI, automation or data science work.
Escaping is not simple either. Some 84% of UK companies surveyed reported delays in the past 12 months because they lacked suitable hardware or compute capacity. Of those weighing a supplier switch, 91% incurred extra costs from fragmented data environments, and 85% had faced restricted or delayed access to data they needed at least once.
CEBR's modelling suggests that recovering the overspend could support £1.4 billion of productive investment, £800 million of workforce training, 8,235 additional jobs and a long-run GDP uplift of £1.4 billion. The survey behind the findings was run by Sapio Research in July and August 2026 among 690 senior business and IT decision-makers across the UK, US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Marty Falaro, Wasabi's president and COO, said: "Businesses are not short of ambition, but they are blindsided by unpredictable infrastructure costs that prevent them from driving their innovation agendas forward". Owen Good, head of economics advisory at CEBR, said hiring and investment in new technologies are postponed or reduced "as budgets are redirected to cover unexpected charges". Wasabi sells cloud object storage, so the study carries a vendor's interest as well as an economist's.
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