The GPU instances use Nvidia GRID K2 cards, which cost $3000 in qty 1. AWS only runs two GPU instances per card, so they need to recoup the cost from fewer inst

The GPU instances use Nvidia GRID K2 cards, which cost $3000 in qty 1. AWS only runs two GPU instances per card, so they need to recoup the cost from fewer instances than typically share components. Nvidia's high end cards (GRID, Tesla) also have significantly disproportionate per-gflop costs. The g2 instance costs have also come down a bit in the last 6 months, so they used to be even more overpriced. For $8.4mm you can run 592 g2 instances reserved for 3 years and get 1,355,680 gflops. In a datacenter environment (including power, network equipment, installation, redundancy, etc.) you could achieve that level of performance for $3mm (not using GRID or Tesla cards). And then bandwidth prices really blow EC2 out of the water.