Analyzing unit costs using Cloud Intelligence Dashboards on AWS with NXP

NXP manufactures semiconductor chips for the automotive, industrial, Internet of Things, mobile, and communications infrastructure markets. The company previously monitored costs and managed spending by using a third-party FinOps tool, but this came with expensive licensing fees and limited visibility into infrastructure usage.

To improve cost efficiency and resource allocation, teams needed more granular insights. With multicloud workloads and high-cost HPC jobs for chip verification, NXP required visibility at the unit-cost level—something the existing tool couldn’t provide. The manufacturer also sought greater flexibility to centralize data and tailor dashboards to the needs of different teams.

To address these challenges, the company moved from the third-party tool to its own FinOps solution on AWS, completing a phased migration in 3 months.

With its in-house solution on AWS, NXP gained greater visibility by automatically gathering data from all its AWS accounts into a centralized environment. “Cloud Intelligence Dashboards on AWS gave us an open source framework that we could build on,” says Abhinandan Jha, principal development, security, and operations engineer at NXP.

To analyze petabyte-scale data where it lives with ease and flexibility, NXP uses Amazon Athena. The company can also dive deeper into its AWS cost and usage by creating AWS Cost and Usage Reports. By combining these services, NXP efficiently processes large volumes of cost and usage data.

Users access usage data through convenient dashboards in Amazon Quick Sight, an AI-powered business intelligence service. These dashboards provide both high-level summaries of monthly costs and information on specific services and workloads. “We have everything on our control plane, where we can analyze data,” says Jha. “If we require more customization, we can create our own dashboards.”

By incorporating data from other cloud environments into AWS, the solution supports multicloud visibility. NXP standardizes this data with the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) and presents it in a consolidated view on the FOCUS Dashboard. As a result, teams can compare usage and costs across environments, drilling into individual resources such as HPC workloads or storage. This helps teams better understand how spending aligns with business activity.

In addition, NXP implemented role-based access controls to help maintain data privacy. Users can view only the cost data relevant to their business units, but centralized teams retain organization-wide visibility. “As a multicloud business, we’ve created a flexible, transparent solution that gives us access control for different user types,” says Jha.

NXP cut third-party licensing fees and centralized data access, reducing FinOps tooling costs by 75 percent and increasing FinOps efficiency by 90 percent. “Using Cloud Intelligence Dashboards on AWS as a FinOps tool, we have near real-time visibility into costs and apply financial economics principles to streamline resource allocation,” says Sundeep Jain, enterprise AI, cloud, and digital infrastructure leader. “We can forecast and optimize our cloud spend while improving long-term financial planning and accountability.”

Now, the company can perform unit-cost analysis of compute and storage resources to identify inefficiencies and accelerate decisions. With the foundation in place on AWS, NXP plans to expand unit-cost tracking to additional HPC workloads and broaden multicloud visibility across its chip-design environments. “Cloud Intelligence Dashboards on AWS transformed how we govern cloud investments,” says Varinder Pal Singh, senior vice president and chief information officer at NXP. “By combining financial discipline, predictive insight, and clear accountability, we can maximize cost efficiency.”