AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#171

Post by Noaidi » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

lynndotpy wrote: post #102

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- 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…

"Moore's Law" purports that there is more computer over time. "Sam's Law" purports that we asymptote to have a consistent amount of computer; or, we have the same amount of computer over time. "Leslie's Law" purports that we peak and then start to decrease; or, we eventually have less computer over time. We might be living in Sam's world or even Leslie's world.

"Moore's Law" thrives under socialism.

"Sam's Law" exists under neoliberalism.

"Leslie's Law" is the result of fascism.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#172

Post by mk_stjames » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #68

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- 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…

For Christmas I got an alarm clock that basically doesn’t function without a $50/year subscription. For an alarm clock (Hatch.co). Consumers need to get better at understanding TCO when buying things. Or maybe the government should be slapping those “annual cost” stickers like they do on washing machines to understand how much electricity they use.

Paying a subscription for an alarm clock. I've heard this one before! [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35840393

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#173

Post by dpkirchner » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

gnfargbl wrote: post #61

xvxvx wrote: post #12

- 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…

The answer lies in one of your questions: > Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door In the UK at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, a solid proportion of groceries are now delivered to the door. But, that doesn't mean that supermarkets have closed; if anything, they seem to be busier than ever. Instead, we have a hybrid market where convenience for the consume…

In parts of the US, even low-crime areas, a significant amount of the items at grocery stores are locked up in glass cases. If you want them you have to track down an employee and beg for access (and in some stores they won't let you carry the items to the register). That part of the store might as well be closed to visitors, replaced by vending machines.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#174

Post by mort96 » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #164

mort96 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As 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.

Maybe 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.

Sure, 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.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#175

Post by voxleone » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

I 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.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#176

Post by nicoburns » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #131

nicoburns wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices. TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decid…

> TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. While it would certainly be devastating, do note that TSMC has fabs in places that aren't Taiwan. So their entire production wouldn't immediately go offline, and presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an i…

> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories

There are rumours from seemingly credible sources that Taiwan has the TSMC factories (at least the ones located in Taiwan) rigged with explosives that they intend to trigger in case of invasion by China (as a disincentive against China invading). So China may well not have any say in the matter.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#177

Post by cyberpunk » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #137

kllrnohj wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is subscriptions need to support IT staff, data centers, and profit margins. A computer under your desk at home has none of those support costs and it gets price competition from used parts which subscriptions don't have. Cloud (storage, compute, whatever) has so far consistently been more expensive than local compute over even short timeframes (storage especially, I can buy a portable 2TB drive for the eq…

Subscription is still worth it for most people though. Sure it costs more, but your 2TB plan isn't a single harddrive, it is likely across several harddrives with RAID ensuring that when (not if!) they fail no data is lost, plus remote backups. When something breaks the subscription fixes that for no extra charge. If you know how to admin a computer and have time for it, then doing it yourself is cheaper. However mak…

I’m not even sure it does cost more. I could have a geforcenow subscription for like 8 years before it’s more expensive than building a similar spec gaming rig.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#178

Post by kakacik » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #164

mort96 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As 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.

Maybe 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.

... 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.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#179

Post by zwnow » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #170

zwnow wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You have that option, it's called buying a house and getting a mortgage. You just rent from the bank for 30 years first. But you're not thinking x=30 with any responsibility other than writing a check, I bet. If I had to guess, I'd say you want x There's a reason why a mortgage with very little down payment is a lot more than comparable rent.

> It's fine to want that but let's not pretend "rent should be illegal" is a serious or reasonable policy proposal.

So its fine for you that there are people owning 20+ properties speculating on profit for basic human needs? Its literally Nestlé "this is MY water" behavior.

Re: AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

#180

Post by jerf » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 2:31 PM UTC

andruby wrote: post #144

cj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Christmas I got an alarm clock that basically doesn’t function without a $50/year subscription. For an alarm clock (Hatch.co). Consumers need to get better at understanding TCO when buying things. Or maybe the government should be slapping those “annual cost” stickers like they do on washing machines to understand how much electricity they use.

That's a terrible gift! Did the g(r)ifter know it needed such a subscription?

An immense amount of abuse is being done to "consumers" because most people don't have a mental model for how expensive subscriptions are and end up counting them as nearly free, because they are not even tomorrow's problem, but next month's problem. Entire industries run on that principle, like the burgeoning buy now pay later space (which promise no interest but I promise you they're not making money on a whole bunch of "0% interest" loans so you do the math). Meanwhile companies love the recurring revenue. It's a perfect storm of corporate greed meeting a consumer blindspot.

Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.