Cloud Cost News Roundup for July 2025

5 min read

July 2025 delivered some high‑stakes cloud cost stories. Figma’s $300K-a-day AWS bill grabbed headlines, Amazon’s cloud growth stumbled, and governments started pushing for deep discounts. Meanwhile, a majority of UK and Ireland organizations admitted they still can’t fully see where their cloud spend is going.

Here’s your July cloud cost news roundup and a reminder that FinOps is now central to modern cloud operations. With cloud spend hitting record highs and financial blind spots holding teams back, organizations need smarter systems to stay in control.

Key Stories from July

Amnic AI is now available in the new AWS Marketplace AI Agents and Tools category

Amnic’s context-aware FinOps AI Agents are now available in AWS Marketplace for customers to discover, purchase, and deploy using their AWS accounts. These agents automate repetitive FinOps tasks, perform root cause analysis, and generate persona-specific reports to help teams save time and reduce cost anomalies faster.

With features like Cost Allocation, Unit Economics, and Budgeting, Amnic enables better cloud cost visibility and control. Available as a SaaS solution, the agents also support natural language queries, democratizing the understanding of cloud costs across teams.

Google may slash cloud costs in new government deal

Google Cloud is reportedly close to finalizing a major deal with the U.S. government that could lead to significant reductions in cloud service pricing.

As part of a broader push by the General Services Administration (GSA) to cut federal IT spending, this agreement would see Google offering deep discounts on its cloud services, similar to Oracle’s recent move to slash certain software license costs by up to 75%.

The initiative is part of an ongoing effort to reform government procurement and reduce the estimated $20 billion the U.S. government spends annually on cloud infrastructure. While Google appears to be leading these negotiations, similar discount arrangements are expected from other cloud giants like Microsoft Azure and AWS.

If finalized, the deal could set a new precedent for how large-scale government cloud contracts are priced and could influence commercial pricing strategies as well.

Design platform Figma spends $300,000 on AWS daily

We know it’s old news by now, but Figma’s cloud spend is still turning heads. In its S-1 filing, Figma revealed it’s shelling out nearly $300,000 every day on AWS services, totaling a minimum $545 million over five years under a renewed hosting agreement signed in May 2025.

While the breakdown of costs (compute, storage, bandwidth) wasn’t detailed, the dependency on AWS is clear and critical. The company even noted that any disruption or policy shift by AWS could significantly impact its operations.

This brings back conversations around rising cloud costs as companies scale, 37signals being a prominent example. The company has been gradually exiting the cloud since 2022 and reported saving $2M in 2024 alone, with an additional $1.3M expected by ditching S3.

54% of organizations in the UK and Ireland lack cloud cost visibility

A new survey of over 1,000 IT decision-makers in the UK and Ireland reveals that 54% of organizations lack full visibility into their cloud spending. This visibility gap undermines accurate ROI calculation and contributes to only 33% of cloud projects achieving all intended goals.

While hybrid cloud adoption has increased to 68%, legacy infrastructure remains a major obstacle, with 71% of organizations citing outdated systems as a drag on innovation, and 70% believing cloud migration could reduce costs.

Yet nearly half (46%) report that management fails to prioritize migration efforts. Encouragingly, 82% say cloud migration promotes a more agile culture. The rise in MSP (Managed Service Provider) involvement, now at 40%, is helping close the gap: MSP-supported projects are 6.6% more likely to meet objectives and 8.3% more likely to stay within scope and timeline.

James Young from Ekco summed it up: organizations are investing heavily in cloud, but without FinOps-driven cost visibility and optimization, they are essentially “flying blind.”

Amazon share price tumbles 7% after cloud computing growth disappoints investors

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While Amazon Web Services (AWS) edged past Wall Street expectations with 17.5% revenue growth in Q2, it paled in comparison to Microsoft Azure’s 39% and Google Cloud’s 32%. Despite $31.4B in capital expenditures this year (more than its competitors), AWS's growth failed to impress investors, sending Amazon’s stock down nearly 7% and wiping out around $170 billion in market value.

Margins for AWS shrank to 32.9%, their lowest since late 2023, and Amazon’s overall operating income forecast also came in below expectations. CEO Andy Jassy acknowledged that it's still "early days" in the AI race, but emphasized AWS’s readiness once current capacity constraints ease.

Interestingly, while the cloud business stumbled, Amazon’s retail unit delivered strong results, with 11% growth in online sales, though analysts noted that cloud performance will remain the key driver of the company’s stock in the near term.

OpenAI expands cloud partnerships with Google for ChatGPT, diversifying computing resources

OpenAI has officially expanded its cloud infrastructure strategy by adding Google Cloud as a key provider for powering ChatGPT, joining its existing suppliers like Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and CoreWeave.

Finalized in May 2025, the partnership signals a significant move to diversify beyond Microsoft, address GPU scarcity, and support the growing demand for AI compute capacity. With Google Cloud’s global network, including regions like the U.S., UK, Japan, Norway, and the Netherlands, OpenAI gains access to high-performance GPUs and TPUs, improving redundancy, performance, and geographic coverage.

This multi-cloud approach not only mitigates vendor lock-in risks but also underscores a broader industry shift toward collaborative infrastructure strategies, even among traditional competitors.

Summing up

As organizations grapple with budget blowouts, vendor lock‑in, and governance pressures, the role of FinOps is more than essential to modern cloud strategy. Amnic enables teams to adopt FinOps practices with built-in capabilities like anomaly detection, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting. If you're looking to strengthen your FinOps maturity, take Amnic for a spin and see the difference.