AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

I've been tracking AWS for a long time, with a specific emphasis on pricing. "What happens if AWS hikes prices" has always been something of a boogeyman, trotted out as a hypothetical to urge folks to avoid taking dependencies on a given provider. Over the weekend - on a Saturday, no less - that hypothetical became real. AWS …

[elsergiovolador]

Hike

* Manager walks the open plan office *

- You, you and you!

- Yes?

- You are going hiking. Home.

- Why?

- Dunno, it's AWS Hike.

[Anonymous Coward]

One direction...

> AWS has long benefited from the assumption that cloud pricing only trends in one direction.

.... up? I don't think I've ever seen a company lower its Cloud bill without extreme effort to do so. And even then, it's lower *now*, but it immediately starts again trundling upward.

I've never worked at a company (start-ups) where the cloud expense didn't become an existential crisis for the company. (Well, maybe my current/new one isn't at quite that point.)

[FIA]

Re: One direction...

The quote I heard many years ago was if your monthly spend is in the hundreds of thousands range then Amazon will work really hard with you to help bring that down.

If you're in the millions they know you're locked in and make much less effort.

[mattaw2001]

Re: One direction...

I would like to add that I believe Amazon sees 100,000's being the optimal point for them to invest to ensure your future architecture thinking and planning is cloud based, AWS preferably, to prevent / extinguish the investment into local skills and infrastructure.

That way they cloud lock more 100,000 -> millions annual spend.

Once you grow they have you, no need to invest as you end up hiring cloud engineers instead of system admins and database admins.

[Zakspade]

It's not just an 'IT thing.' Across the world, big business are squeezing every drop of life fluid they can from punters (you and me). This ensures that the $billions they take turn into even more $billions and the figure become even more obscene.

Too often, turnovers, gross and profits are referenced in BILLIONS and I fear that the majority (but probably not the erstwhile readers of The Register) cannot process the difference between a million and a billion.

For anyone who accidentally landed here from a tabloid website, think of it like this:

You win $MILLION. Ignoring investing or interest, you decide to take $100k per year to live on. The initial $1MILLION will fund you for 10 years.

You win $BILLION. Ignoring investing or interest, you decide to take $100k per year to live on. The initial $1BILLION will fund you for 10 thousand years. Or to put it another way - if you decide to give yourself an allowance of $1million per year, you will kit that kitty in ONE THOUSAND YEARS.

How much do the likes of Apple, AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, Tesco, Costco, Walmart, (the list is long) make in profit? From you and me, while we reckon having $30k in the bank makes us rich.

When the likes of AWS screw THEIR corporate customers - trust me, they get their increased costs of doing business from those at the bottom. Us.

[retiredFool]

Enter the trillionaire

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how that changes the numbers. But for fun, change it from a mil/yr to a mil/day as the 1st calculation.

Much like AI energy consumption, unimaginable.

[ThinkingMonkey]

Million vs Billion

I've always liked the "counting to a million vs counting to a billion" analogy. Notably, you can't count the larger numbers in one second, but assuming you could, a million would take about 11 days, a billion would take over 31 years. (One trillion would take over 31,000 years.) Yet the "billion" and "trillion" is being thrown around these days like it's a normal, everyday thing, e.g. "OpenAI Announces $1.4 trillion Data Center Buildout Commitment"

[A Non e-mouse]

Anybody who assumes prices will fall for ever is an idiot.

[An_Old_Dog]

Pricing Complexity

It is axiomatic that any company using a complex pricing structure is running a snow-job on its customers and (if any) regulators.

[Merrill]

Re: Pricing Complexity

Pricing is like taxation -

Jean-Baptiste Colbert 1619–83

"The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."

[DLYONS]

Basically your seeing the overall plan. Now you can't own your own kit, it to expensive (RAM and CPU) (intentionally) to rebuild your data centres, now they will just squeeze. They have all your data, have all your business functions. What are you going to do.

[The Dogs Meevonks]

All You Data Belong To US

The end of the road for owning your own computer... only the ultra rich will be able to afford and source the components... you'll be sold some expensive 'thin client' style device connected to their data centers, all compute, graphics, storage done by them and sent to you... No more gaming at home, no more owning your own data... you're a subscriber paying a monthly fee for the rest of your life.

With no way to opt out of data harvesting, tracking or advertising.

That's the end goal here...

[Ken Hagan]

Re: All You Data Belong To US

And yet, most variants of the Raspberry PI 5, running a spyware-free OS and quite capable for most domestic workloads, are still under 100 euros/dollars/pounds.

Of course, many of those domestic workloads require you to log into some privacy-thieving horror of a website. That seems to me to be the bigger problem here.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: All You Data Belong To US

It'll take a concerted effort from all to stop it. I Iived decades without a computer and can easily do it again. Younguns, that would be harder.

I imagine it's going to come to a point where people just start attacking data centers to burn them out. The data center owners probably think this too which is why they are trying to move them to space. A ground station is much smaller than a data center and can be disguised as a tree, and is much cheaper.

[M.V. Lipvig]

The change had been telegraphed: AWS's pricing page noted (and bizarrely, still does) that "current prices are scheduled to be updated in January, 2026," though the company neglected to mention which direction.

I disagree. It clearly states the plans were UPdated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sneaking it out

The big bosses of our global tech company congratulated everyone on double-digit growth in their year end meetings.

Leaving HR to sneak out the loss of a particularly useful perk (2 "recharge" days per quarter) that we have had for a number of years, while we were off for Christmas and New Year.

Asking UK legal about "accepted practice" becoming an unwritten part of employment contracts, has resulted in tumbleweed!

Anon for hopefully obvious reasons

[Elongated Muskrat]

AWS has spent two decades conditioning customers to expect prices only ever go down. That expectation is now broken. Once you've raised prices on one service and the world doesn't end, the second increase becomes easier.

It's good old-fashioned bait-and-switch, and lets' remember what the "A" stands for in "AWS", because Amazon has form in undercutting all of the competition, driving them out of business, and then hiking prices when everyone has got used to buying everything from them without checking elsewhere first. Their initial market (books, for those who don't remember) can now often be found more cheaply on other sites (although don't look too closely at who owns them, yeah?)

The point is, though, that the current price inflation is pretty much down to the "AI" bubble. All these data centres being built to run "AI" workloads have driven up prices of memory, and GPUs, the components used by these data centres, in the hope that people will become hooked on "AI" and the vast investments will turn a hefty profit. This, itself, is built on the myth of eternal growth, the fundamental flaw in thinking in most theories of free market economics. Some of us can see the writing on the wall, and can see historical parallels; "AI" is a bubble, and whilst there are use cases for it, there are no "killer apps" that people will pay inflated prices for. As prices rise, which they will, for the companies that have invested heavily to recoup their costs, the economics changes, and people who have switched to using hallucinatory "AI" to provide services because they are "good enough" and cheaper than a human will find that consumers prefer both non-hallucinatory humans to provide their service, and that the costs of "AI" rise above those of human labour. At this point, "AI" growth stalls, prices sky-rocket, and the bubble bursts. The sound of the bubble popping will be heard from the Moon*. The question is, which players are so heavily invested in "AI" that they go down with it? And when will I be able to afford some DDR5 DIMMs for a gaming PC?

For those who think that the bubble won't burst, just recall that a few years ago, the world and their dog were investing heavily in "the Metaverse", and before that, commodity electronics manufacturers were desperate for you to buy a "3D TV", these were relatively small bubbles in terms of global impact (although Meta alone has reportedly lost $70Bn on "the Metaverse", and they weren't the only ones pumping money into it). History is littered with economic bubbles of varying sizes (Tulip Mania, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Depression, etc. etc.) and humans never learn.

*Yes, sound doesn't travel in a vacuum, but the space between the Earth and Moon is not a perfect vacuum, and it will be a very loud bang.