> Their efficiency is their profit margin. Last time I checked, AWS had a profit margin in the 40%-50% ballpark. Sorry, but the semiconductor industry doesn't

> Their efficiency is their profit margin. Last time I checked, AWS had a profit margin in the 40%-50% ballpark. Sorry, but the semiconductor industry doesn't operate with any kind of markup that would allow such profit margins from "getting better deals on hardware". The only one able to make that kind of profit used to be Intel on high-end server CPUs, and even they are now pressured by AMD and custom ARM silicon options. Anything else needed for a server, RAM or flash chips or whatever, is usually selling on thin single-digit margins. Cloud provider profit margin is perfectly logical and explainable through lock-in effects keeping their customers paying big markups to stay in AWS infrastructure. Be it software that was built against AWS proprietary services, be it having the necessary engineering skills to manage AWS infrastructure in the team but lacking the skills to manage on-prem hardware, be it the enterprise sales teams of cloud operators schmoozing CTOs of big corporations and making them jump on a "going into cloud" strategy as some kind of magic bullet to future-proof their corporations' IT, be it the psychological effect that makes "using the cloud" apparently a mandatory thing to be "cool" in todays' silicon valley culture, and therefore by extension the whole worlds' IT engineering culture. The most ironical of them all is this weird effect that drives people to rationalize these things, writing comments like yours, because nobody likes to admit they've painted themselves into a corner of lock-in effects. And of course there's the irony of this all being history repeating itself: anyone still remembering when IBM dominated the IT industry?