The growth of the global data center landscape has led to increasing energy consumption, with 8 million data centers currently in operation, consuming over 10% of the global electricity supply by 2030. The majority of these servers are idle for extended periods, wasting power and resources. Optimizing cloud resource utilization is crucial to avoid "cloud waste" and reduce energy consumption. Many organizations struggle to fully utilize their purchased cloud resources, wasting up to 30% of their spend. Addressing underutilized compute can make a significant impact, as it often makes up over 50% of the power used by servers. Automation and optimization techniques, such as accurate virtual machine selection, autoscaling, and removing idle instances, can help reduce waste and costs. Companies that fail to optimize their cloud resource use may face significant financial losses, as seen in cases like Asana, Lyft, and Slack, which could have lost millions of dollars on cloud waste if they had implemented optimization strategies.