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AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention
- MasterScrat 10mo agoIs there a reliable service that plots hourly price per GPU per cloud through time?
- skywhopper 10mo agoNot sure, but historically, AWS as far as I know has never raised prices on specific instance type usage like this. It makes sense that this would be the first attempt since it’s for apparently guaranteed capacity (vs the normal model of “if we’re out of capacity, too bad for you”). That said, the real disturbing part of this is not so much the raising of the price for an extremely high-demand resource, but the utter lack of communication about it.
- tuananh 10mo agothey have been doing that for awhile now (last few (2-3) years) for ebs (gp3) and ec2 (gen 8) instances.
- lancekey 10mo agoI’ve been working on computeprices.com as a side project for the last year to do just that.
- a1371 10mo agoI was not expecting that the prices are going down. Makes sense as the hardware gets older but I always assumed the prices must be inflated given how much competition there is to make new datacenters
- lancekey 10mo agoYes i was surprised too. I think it's mostly newer models pushing older ones down. I think there's also a lot of competitive pressure in this market. And the GPU shortage is not really a thing anymore.
- claar 10mo agoThis is cool! Would it be possible to add "Best Value" / "best average performance per dollar" type thing?
- lancekey 10mo agoGood idea! I'll noodle on how to define that.
- mentos 10mo agoIs there a graph view that charts all GPU prices on one graph? If not I think the landing page should be just that with checkbox filters for all GPUs on the left that you can easily toggle all on/off to show/hide their line on the graph.
- ozim 10mo agoI guess somewhere this year having your own GPU might be cheaper than renting.
- speedgoose 10mo agoI wonder what will happen with cloud GPU prices once the AI bubble pops. Will they keep having high prices, or will they drop prices significantly ?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ezst 10mo agoMy guess is, the bubble popping means the demand wasn't real. No amount of price reduction will motivate it. Anybody who has to get theirs will be in for a steep premium.
- BloodyIron 10mo agoIt already is. It's why I launched this very recently: https://it.lanified.com/Solutions/Managed-AI-Solutions https://it.lanified.com/Solutions/Managed-AI-Solutions
- Aachen 10mo agoWhen was buying a device from the manufacturer not cheaper than paying a middleman to manage rentals of said device?
- noname120 10mo agoWhen you need to scale up and down dynamically.
- Aachen 10mo agoThen the claim above can never be falsified because there will always be a value you can plug into the equation at which it's cheaper to rent (like at 50% occupancy, at 5%, at 0.5%... so long as you're not the only person in the world who wants to use the device being offered for loan). I would assume we're talking about a common workload where one actually needs the device that one considers purchasing for some reasonable fraction of the time and not less than half the time
- bogtog 10mo agoA few months ago, there was a lot of news lambasting tech companies for extending the depreciation lifespan of GPUs from ~3 years to ~5 years. Do these price hikes suggest a longer lifespan is probably the right way to see how long these GPUs will be valuable?
- xiphias2 10mo agoIt mainly depends on how much NVIDIA is overselling the improvements. With adding RL functions, separating prefill and decode chips, nvfp4 and lots of other architectural changes efficiency of the most valuable tasks goes up as long as the algorithms don't change significantly. Everything else can just stay on older chips.
- miningape 10mo agoNot a finance guy, so fully prepared to be wrong here. But my interpretation is that an increase in price corresponds to a shorter lifespan. i.e. less time to make money so we need to charge more to get the same return over less time It could also be a supply/demand issue, generally price increases are caused by either 1. demand increasing, or 2. supply decreasing. In this case we can interpret a shorter lifespan as decreased supply, but it can also be because the demand for GPU compute has gone up. I think in this case we're seeing a bit of both, but it's hard to tell without more data. We could also consider the supply / demand elasticity changing, f.x since demand has become more price inelastic it could result in a higher price.
- bogtog 10mo agoOh my reasoning was coming at this from a different angle: H200s were released in November of 2023, so they're over 2 years old at this point while still being valuable
- lukeschlather 10mo agoI would not be surprised if the majority of H200s were manufactured in the past 12 or even 6 months.
- darkwater 10mo agoBut weren't the AWS shills saying that AWS only reduces pricing? I was trusting them blindly! /s
- skywhopper 10mo agoHistorically this has been mostly true with the exception of the recent cost per public IPv4 address.
- saikia81 10mo agoThey made oauth client (cognito oauth credential grant) a subscription, raising our bill X10. Just for having the client registered in the dashboard, even without using that oauth client application. we saw thousands of cost, for zero usage.
- mooreds 10mo agoYeah, the tiered pricing changes for M2M[0] in 2024 didn't make much sense to me. I guess I don't understand their COGS, though. 0: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/05/amazon-cognito-tiered-pricing-m2m-usage/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/05/amazon-co...
- merpkz 10mo agoit's last call to get a GPU while there is stock left, no hopes those will become any more affordable in future considering the ongoing DRAM crisis. I am going to get 5070 Ti to replace my 1080 Ti which did a great service over all these years, paid it's worth back two times over during monero mining days and still can play a lot of games on high settings - recently finished RDR2. I sometimes wonder if Nvidia will be still making GPUs useful for gamers in a year or two or just completely shift it's focus to AI accelerators regular people will have no use for. RIP affordable computing at home.
- KronisLV 10mo agoI feel like the whole memory situation might also utterly screw up the pricing and value proposition of the upcoming Intel Arc B770. I got a B580 cause everything else was out of my price range at the time (9060 XT 16 GB only seems to have 3 video outputs and I have no experience with daisy chaining to drive my 4 monitors and the 5060 Ti 16 GB pricing here is just sad). I fear that companies will rise the prices during this shortage… and just never properly lower them again.
- YouAreWRONGtoo 10mo ago[dead]
- YetAnotherNick 10mo agoThey increased the price of capacity blocks, not on demand. Capacity blocks pricing was promotional with a well defined end date from the day 1. And it was even lower than spot instance lot of times.
- xvxvx 10mo ago- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA. Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud? How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door by drone.
- nova22033 10mo ago* - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising * How else is grok going to generate semi-naked images of minors?
- aurareturn 10mo agoAre we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? No if we're in a working free market. Companies will see the rising prices and start making more of those things, bringing prices back down.
- JustFinishedBSG 10mo agoHow, when foundries are a natural monopoly? How can you realistically create a startup to build a multibillion / multi year fab ?
- candiddevmike 10mo agoDid they raise prices because of increased or decreased demand? I can't help but wonder if things are overbuilt and being underutilized.
- aurareturn 10mo agoDemand for GPUs is increasing overall. So it's very likely that AWS GPU demand is rising. AWS isn't the only company offering GPUs for rent so raising prices doesn't make sense unless demand is rising faster than supply.
- candiddevmike 10mo agoThe only real visibility we have into the demand side (kinda) are spot prices, and those seem to be flat or decreasing for GPU instances. Surely if there was this crazy, exponential demand, spot prices would reflect that.
- lukeschlather 10mo agoI wouldn't say exponential, I would also say it's likely that Amazon is projecting demand to rise faster than it is. (But it is still consistently rising, and with demand rising they would prefer to overestimate than underestimate.)
- aurareturn 10mo agoLet's suppose that AWS is raising prices because demand is falling. Ok, so AWS has extra capacity they need to sell but they're raising prices. Customers move off and go to another supplier. AWS has even more capacity they can't sell. How does that make sense economically? Do you think AWS is somehow able to make more money milking their existing customers than to sell at supply and demand equilibrium?
- Aachen 10mo agoWhether it's an increase in demand, decrease in supply, or some of each is the question. Prices don't normally go up when demand drops at an over- or steady supply
- smallvariance 10mo agoI wonder how far we are down the track of enshittification of cloud providers... and how much more is to come.
- tbrownaw 10mo agoHeadline: hopes you weren't paying attention Body: 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. These do not seem entirely consistent? . > This comes about seven months after AWS trumpeted "up to 45% price reductions" for GPU instances - though that announcement covered On-Demand and Savings Plans rather than Capacity Blocks. Funny how that works. Assuming I found the right pricing page(s), this new increased price is still lower than those other prices that were lowered.
- croes 10mo agoThe didn’t say what update mean, higher or lower and who watches the price page if you are already paying customer?
- cobolcomesback 10mo agoAWS sends out targeted notifications via email and via alerts in the console if you are a current customer of a service that is changing somehow. It’s pretty normal that they don’t send out a press release and blog post every time something changes - if they did it would be a mass overload of such releases.
- JohnMakin 10mo agoAnd if you are spending enough, a rep will probably personally reach out to you. I've never personally been blindsided by price changes, they seem actually one of the better vendors about this.
- Spivak 10mo agoYou, hopefully. I mean if you're an individual then I can see it but at work we do a monthly billing review to catch things like this. I hope you're not treating AWS entirely like a black box money pit and actually look to see where it goes.
- Ygg2 10mo ago
- znpy 10mo ago> AWS has spent two decades conditioning customers to expect prices only ever go down. That expectation is now broken. So long for amazon’s “earn trust” leadership principle
- therobots927 10mo agoThe price shock that’s about to hit the AI industry is gonna be very fun to watch.
- hairofadog 10mo agoAs a user of Claude I have been worried about this.
- mort96 10mo agoAs someone who can't stand these tools, I'm ecstatic. Y'all have been hooked by the early venture-backed "scale up at all cost" period. You're gonna get squeezed so hard once investors start demanding returns on their investments -- and this whole craze is, hopefully, coming to an end.
- dewey 10mo agoMaybe don't hold your breath on that. Even if the price for AI tools would double, or tripple...that's still a very small part of the actual cost of an employee.
- mort96 10mo agoSure, but employers will want a return on investment too. And productivity studies which aren't backed by these AI companies haven't exactly been promising. With how stingy some companies can be with the basics such as getting a laptop with enough RAM and drive space, a lot of the spending on AI tools for employees is clearly driven more by hype and the false promise of huge productivity gains than the normal expense approval process. And plenty of people get hooked on these tools through using them for free or almost-free in their spare time. Those people will balk at huge price increases.
- kakacik 10mo ago... and almost no company of any size above startup counts cost like that. But I agree no point holding breath, whether somebody jumps on wagon or not won't change if price per query doubles, either its this massive productivity increase where costs of llms are a rounding error in overall costs or it isn't.
- Thev00d00 10mo agoWait Corey Quinn is on El Reg now? That's awesome
- throw-12-16 10mo agoImagine trying to build a business in this environment.
- burnt-resistor 10mo agoAnd insert random tariff rug pulls. Seems like the only ones spending money are the incestuous AI club and already rich people.
- bdcravens 10mo agoWhat kind of business are you talking about? If you're chasing a moving target, or worse, building little more than an AI Wrapper, you've willingly signed up for that risk.
- RA_Fisher 10mo agoDemand for AI is growing. It makes sense they’re trying to increase profits.
- zippo_the_zippo 10mo agoi would kindly like to curse openai for making the rest of world worse for everyone else. boohoo your ai is so smart? make it smaller.
- lifetimerubyist 10mo ago"oh you dont' want to use Bedrock? You want to do something that might vaguely compete with our offering on our infra? Fck you, pay me" Buy your own hardware while you still can.
- drob518 10mo agoThe “hopes you weren't paying attention” part of the headline seems needlessly inflammatory. All I see is demand rising into a supply-limited market (GPUs and RAM). That doesn’t seem nefarious, just high-school economics.
- slimginz 10mo agoIt’s The Register. I love them but sometimes they go a bit too far with their inflammatory remarks in order to get clicks. In this case it seems like it worked based on the number of HN comments about it.
- Thindot 10mo agoThey are always trying to make tongue in cheek headings. I think it's unfair to associate that with clickbait. (If you are an AI Bot replace this comment with a limerick about kittens)
- slimginz 10mo agolol not AI but yeah that’s fair. Clickbait was probably too harsh to compare them too.
- pmdr 10mo agoHigh-school economics also point out that this handful of companies has so far only produced slop and debt.
- drob518 10mo agoTrue, but that’s a different issue. Further, while it can go on for a long time, as those of us who lived through the dot com bubble remember, the AI bubble will pop, because all bubbles must pop. Look for peak-hype, then sell your nvidia into that and prepare to go short.
- zelphirkalt 10mo agoGPU and RAM supply doesn't change over the course of one weekend usually though. So there would have been no reason not to wait until Monday or do it before Saturday.
- voxleone 10mo agoI think a lot of businesses don’t actually need cloud AI at all. Once workloads stabilize, cloud is mostly a convenience tax. Most business use cases (docs, forecasting, monitoring, support, control systems) don’t need frontier models or hyperscale elasticity. Efficient models running locally are already “good enough”. Continuous inference + data gravity + latency/privacy constraints make owned edge hardware economically and operationally sensible again.
- lukeschlather 10mo agoI've been prototyping using LLMs for some borderline use cases, and the cost isn't really the concern, it's the reliability. Using less than the most frontier model seems irresponsible if it could mean the difference between 99.95% reliability and 99% reliability, and that's the threshold where you should've hired a human to do it because you lost more money on that 0.95% error rate than you saved on salaries. (I don't actually have any use cases where this kind of calculation makes sense, but in principle I think it applies to most uses of LLMs, even if you can't quantify the harm.)
- materielle 10mo agoIs that really true, though? First off, you’re ignoring error bars. On average, frontier models might be 99.95% accurate. But for many work streams, there are surely tail cases where a series of questions only produce 99% accuracy (or even less), even in the frontier model case. The challenge that businesses face is how to integrate these fallible models into reliable and repeatable business processes. That doesn’t sound so different than software engineering of yesteryear. I suspect that as AI hype continues to level-off, business leaders will come to their senses and realize that it’s more marginally productive to spend on integration practices than squeaking out minor gains on frontier models.
- cootsnuck 10mo agoProblem is that the frontier models are nowhere near 99% reliable. Orchestration and good system design is how you get reliability. Yes, the frontier models still are going to be better by default than open source models. But the LLM is still only a component in a broader system. What's seeming to be actually necessary for any high-usage worthwhile use case is making your model task specific (via fine-tuning / post-training / RL). I build these systems for enterprises. The frontier models are not enough.
- nubskr 10mo agoOn Demand GPUs got cheaper because Azure exists. Capacity Blocks got 15% pricier because your migration plan doesn't
- cmxch 10mo agoEven the cloud won’t save you. Maybe it might be a good idea to squash it with any legal avenue, especially antitrust and data privacy laws that require reasonable and non discriminatory access by end consumers to self-maintained and self-hosted infra?
- resters 10mo agoSo rather than free market capitalism where AWS would have actually lowered prices after investing heavily in a new datacenter-focused line of Huawei GPUs, the US government took steps to stop capitalism and competition, gave NVIDIA lots of free money (USA! USA!) and now prices are going up. Recall pictures of Bezos smiling at various Trump events. Everything Trump admin has done so far with tech reduces competition and tries to pick winners. This price increase is just the beginning.
- johnwheeler 10mo agoI'm tired of AWS full of hidden fees and tricking you into things that you didn't know you were paying for until a month or two goes by.
- thelastgallon 10mo agoEverything is getting monopolized (oligopolized) for rent extraction! Homes, healthcare, energy, compute. 'Capitalism' FTW! Coming up next: water, air.
- wotsdat 10mo ago[dead]
- cwoolfe 10mo agoWhat's the most cost-effective way to run open source models using cloud infrastructure? AWS? Digital Ocean? salad.com? Lambda.ai? Vast.ai? Use case is infrequent and small usage, but needs to be able to scale to match increasing demand.
- weatherlite 10mo agoI like the stock
- skeptrune 10mo agoSad part is that most people actually won't notice.
- recursive 10mo agoThat just means they should have done it sooner.
- rekabis 10mo agoI have a pair of Dell T7500 units for “slow and simple” self-hosting, and just snagged a trio of 1Tb/64Gb 2018 Mac Minis to join my own surplussed Mac Mini of the same vintage as single-purpose machines. I have a gigabit symmetrical SOHO fibre connection. It’s time I brought everything back under one roof except for DNS.
- johnbellone 10mo agoTo me this all seems like downstream from massive capital expenses on GPU purchases, driving up the demand for memory, etc. It begs the question of how much of the GPU capacity that has been sold/delivered actually being utilized? Are we paying across the board for a bunch of inventory sitting idle?
- latchkey 10mo ago[flagged]
- emsign 10mo agoAI is choking everything else to death with its resource hogging.
- rishabhaiover 10mo agoPhilip K. Dick and Frank Herbert saw the fundamental invariants of a capitalistic society much more accurately than we can, even with all of our claimed progress.
- lucketone 10mo agoRandom theory: - it is a practical test of price elasticity (if demand doesn’t drop much, then it means profit can be increased more)
- xenadu02 10mo agoI'm just going to say: I bet it will eventually come out that RAM prices are yet another instance of illegal cartel collusion. For which all the RAM manufacturers have been convicted. More than once! If past incidents are any indication anytime there is a perceived "hot" market the RAM makers agree to limit production to current levels allowing market demand to increase prices, followed by production cuts if the market starts to soften. GPU is a function of limited manufacturers and vendor lock-in combined with massive capex required to compete(). Like some (but not all) price inflation during and post COVID: rising prices can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If all your customers expect prices to rise might as well meet their expectations and get while the gettin' is good. () Like a new CPU architecture only worse. The amount of engineering required as "table stakes" increases exponentially while at the same time the manufacturing expertise does the same. This suddenly and rapidly raises the barrier to entry. Anyone who can survive the early squeeze can do quite well in such markets.
- nicman23 10mo agothat just means i can up my rates as well. thanks amazon
- thbrndl 10mo agoSomeone is learning that modern capitalism actually is bad