Here’s what our cloud hosts had to say about this week’s episode: 337: AWS Discovers Prices Can Go Both Ways, Raises GPU Costs 15 Percent
Justin Brodley
Cloud computing vendors have always promised that “prices only go down,” but that was always a bit of a myth. Price hikes were basically hidden in new billing models or new versions of existing services, coupled with CPU/memory ratio improvements. For example, the C6i.large vs the C7i.large gives you a 4.9% increase in cost, but you get 4th Gen Xeon vs 3rd Gen Xeon and—according to Amazon’s own benchmarks—a 15% overall performance improvement. The advantage, of course, is that you don’t have to upgrade to the new instance if you don’t want to.
This Amazon price increase for EC2 Capacity Blocks is different. It’s an increase on the same product. It’s not an architectural jump. It’s not a new capability. Most of you won’t notice unless you’re training a lot of AI/LLM models, but once you’ve done one price increase, what’s the resistance to doing another?
Breaking this implicit contract may have future ramifications for AWS’s business—which has only seemed to get more AI-focused and less about delivering on Customer Obsession.
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