The Problem With Chasing GPU Utilization

Walk into any AI infrastructure discussion and you’ll hear the same question: What’s your GPU utilization? It’s become the infrastructure equivalent of asking a web service for its CPU utilization. The assumption is simple: higher utilization is better. After all, GPUs are expensive, and a cluster running at 90% utilization sounds far more impressive than one running at 50%. For a long time, I believed that too. Then I spent more time working on GPU scheduling and multi-tenant AI workloads....

June 16, 2026