Fabric Data Agent CU Calculation based on Query

Your estimate only includes LLM token usage, but Fabric Data Agent CU includes full execution cost.

The gap comes from:

• multiple LLM calls per query (not just one)

• schema + prompt expansion on every call

• SQL/Spark execution on data

• retries and query corrections

• metadata scans and grounding

So 10 queries ≠ 10 executions. It is usually 3–7x more operations, and data compute dominates CU, which is why you see ~54k instead of ~1k.

Recently I discussed about this in detail in my blog. Hope this will help.

https://vinsdata.in/blog/how-fabric-data-agent-actually-consumes-your-capacity-a-practical-guide-to-cost-optimisation