Supply and demand, I think — their DCs just don't have that many of that instance-type to go around. On GCP, even to this day, the Zen 2+3 instance type (N2D)

Supply and demand, I think — their DCs just don't have that many of that instance-type to go around. On GCP, even to this day, the Zen 2+3 instance type (N2D) doesn't cost more than the equivalent Intel N2 type; but you get very low quotas for N2D CPUs per project, and they aggressively refuse quota increases for them. I assume that AWS here went with the other option for Zen 4, and just raised the price until demand went down enough that nobody was hitting the quotas any more. After all, they can always lower it later.