AWS is so profitable it turned Amazon from a marginal business into a tech giant. As for Google and Microsoft they don't get out of bed in the morning for anyth

AWS is so profitable it turned Amazon from a marginal business into a tech giant. As for Google and Microsoft they don't get out of bed in the morning for anything less than a billion dollar opportunity. A large part of the cost of a VM on these clouds is paying their super high employee comp, for advanced software development e.g. CosmosDB/DynamoDB, but most of all, contributing to the high revenue growth that drives stock prices. It's not paying for the actual cost of hardware. Smart people know this and don't run in the cloud unless they get a sweetheart deal. Consider that GitHub, for example, runs/ran in their own datacenter and used the cloud only for spillover capacity. Zoom also (although now Oracle cut them a sweetheart deal). Netflix built their own CDN etc.