Most companies view the monthly bill for cloud services as an expense to be paid and forgotten. However, the startup CloudLens AI offers a different perspective: the amount hidden in this bill can become a budget for the next artificial intelligence project.
The company, founded by Abhijit Rudra and Nisha Srivastava, has developed a platform for optimizing cloud costs that operates without direct access to the client's infrastructure. Instead of interfering with the working environment, the company transforms a six-month billing summary into a roadmap for reinvestment.
This approach is relevant against the backdrop of growing end-user expenses on public cloud services. According to Gartner estimates, global spending reached $723.4 billion in 2025, with expected market growth of 21.3% in 2026. In India, one of the fastest-growing markets, public cloud spending is projected to increase by 28.1% to $17.5 billion in 2026. Nevertheless, CloudLens AI founders believe that nearly a quarter of global cloud spending is spent inefficiently or misallocated, and companies continue to pay for it for months because they do not see these funds.
A key feature of the product is that it does not require access requests. Unlike most FinOps and cost optimization tools, which require API access to the client's active cloud environment—a requirement often rejected during security and compliance checks, especially for organizations handling sensitive data under standards like HIPAA—CloudLens AI completely bypasses this issue. Clients register on the SaaS platform and upload an AWS billing summary, which is typically a 25–28 page document.
The platform's artificial intelligence, built on models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, analyzes six months of spending patterns and generates a report of about 30 pages in just two minutes. This report identifies overused resources, inactive services, and unused capacity in components such as EC2 and RDS. Importantly, the platform is not limited to documenting losses; it reframes these findings as investment opportunities. Instead of stating, 'You are wasting $20,000 a month,' the system indicates: 'Here is $240,000 a year you could direct toward a new AI workflow.'
Nisha Srivastava notes that such scenarios are regularly discovered during real assessments. One client spent six months trying to secure funding for an AI project but found that $18,000 per month, or $216,000 annually, was simply sitting as cloud waste. Another client redirected $20,000 monthly to an AI-based customer service platform. A third used $8,000 per month freed up from unused resources to hire a data engineer. She emphasizes: 'Your next AI budget is in your cloud bill, not in the board of directors.'
Rudra argues that traditionally, cloud cost management was the responsibility of the engineering department, but the situation is rapidly changing. This is because cloud costs have taken second or third place among a company's balance sheet items, only surpassed by payroll. When the discussion shifts from 'cloud costs' to 'an annual saving of $240,000 available for reinvestment,' the CFO, CEO, and CTO find a reason to participate in the discussion.
The agentless model is also important from a speed perspective. Since infrastructure access is not required, ownership or management disputes are eliminated, allowing management to conduct an assessment and decide on reallocation within a single board meeting. CloudLens AI also positions itself as a tool to expand the AWS partner ecosystem. Rudra points out that AWS has long wanted customers using direct payment to switch to partner billing, but partners offering cost optimization often face rejection due to the access issue. A partner arriving with an assessment requiring only a billing summary opens a dialogue with the client, leading to a transition to billing and ultimately new workloads on AWS.
In its first two months of operation, the company reported working with over 20 clients in the US, the Middle East, and India, receiving very positive feedback. The company's five-year goal is ambitious: to create a world where companies read their cloud bills as they read their balance sheets, and AI marks losses and recommends reallocations in real time. The founders view this product, created in India and sold globally, as a typical story of an Indian startup achieving more with existing resources.
Alibaba Cloud has announced a significant acceleration of its global development, opening new regional data centers in Paris, France, and Johor, Malaysia. These steps were presented at the VivaTech 2026 event in Paris, alongside expansions in Tokyo and Mexico.
The new additions increase Alibaba Cloud's total number of regions to 32 and availability zones to 105 worldwide. This rapid growth is driven by the explosive increase in the need for deploying artificial intelligence models. The company reported that revenue from MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) tokens grew 15 times compared to the previous year in the first five months of 2026.
Contrary to the long-term trend of decreasing costs in cloud computing, in early 2026, AWS, Google Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud raised prices for AI computing power. AWS was the first to raise prices for overseas AI computing by approximately 15% in January, followed by Google Cloud, and then Alibaba Cloud in March. It is important to note that the price increase applied exclusively to AI products, while general cloud servers continued to show cost reductions. This indicates a fundamental shift in the supply and demand dynamics within the AI infrastructure.
In February 2025, Alibaba Cloud made overseas expansion a strategic priority, creating a specialized division for this purpose, which includes hundreds of employees. Company management characterized the internal launch as 'a magnificent turning point in the development of Alibaba Cloud, which spans over ten years.' The company plans investments in AI data centers worth about $52.7 billion, which could potentially rise to $69 billion. In the last 12 months alone, Alibaba spent approximately $16 billion on AI-related purchases, including data centers.
Regarding branding, Alibaba Group signed a multi-year partnership agreement with UEFA and UC3 in May 2026. Through this, the company became the Official Partner in AI, Cloud Computing, and E-commerce for the UEFA Champions League and the UEFA European Championship 2028. This collaboration will utilize the large language model Qwen to manage media, fan engagement, and create immersive content.
According to Synergy Research Group data, Alibaba Cloud holds about a 4% share of the global cloud infrastructure market, while AWS holds 29%, Microsoft Azure holds 20%, and Google Cloud holds 13%. Although the company dominates China (IaaS share is 27.9% as of the second half of 2025), international markets are a key area for growth. While the company demonstrated nine consecutive quarters of single-digit revenue growth, global hyperscalers maintained growth rates of around 20%. AI deployment is transforming competition in the cloud sector, requiring computation to be placed closer to end-users to ensure low-latency responses from agents and applications, making the density of global nodes a strategic asset.
