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

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

#291

Post by dangus »

Sander_Marechal wrote: post #248
TrackerFF wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason, people are just more into paying for $10 / subscription fees, than they into financing stuff. To such a degree that they able to pay for a bunch of subscriptions they completely forget about.

The difference is that with financing you're stuck with it (and your credit rating drops, at least in the EU here). You're not stuck with a subscription. If your income changes and you can't afford it anymore then you can cancel your subscription.

Oh sure, my original comment’s point was just to allude to the point that costs are going up for all methods of compute, so that fact alone shouldn’t influence your buy versus rent versus finance decision too much.

This idea that there’s a conspiracy to take personal computing away from the masses seems far fetched to me.

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

#292

Post by slavik81 »

SirMaster wrote: post #232
TrackerFF wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is that if subscription goes up from $10 to $15, that doesn't seem to bad. But if you want to purchase a new computer, and the price goes from $1000 to $1500, then that's a pretty big deal. (Though in reality, the price of said computer would probably go up even more, minimum double. RAM prices are already up 6-8 fold from summer)

Building a PC price is not double lol and RAM is nowhere near up 6-8x https://www.bestbuy.com/product/crucial-pro-overclocking-32g... That 32GB for $274 was not $34-$45 in the summer. RAM is up like 3x, but RAM is one of the cheaper parts of the PC. RAM that was $100 in summer is like $300 now when I look. So that's an extra $200 maybe $300, on say a $1500 build. GPUs are not up, they are still at MSRP: https://www.b…

Corsair Vengeance 128 GB (2 x 64 GB) DDR5-6400. $339 in Sept 2025. $1599 in Jan 3026. 4.7x increase. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/LPvscf/corsair-vengeance-12...

I cancelled my plans to upgrade my workstation, as the price of 256 GB of RAM became ridiculous.

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

#293

Post by y0ssar1an »

pphysch wrote: post #249
nicoburns wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Why would Taiwan destroying its own assets disincentivize annexation goals that have existed long before computer chips were produced there?

If Taiwan is being invaded, the annexation is happening. There's no longer any reason to disincentivize annexation. Destroying the fabs is about denying China a major prize.

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

#294

Post by pepperball »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #41
mikasisiki wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible. Either way, many people literally sleep in a monthly subscription model — rent.

You still have to pay for utilities and taxes: No way to escape that unless you live in the wilderness.

> No way to escape that unless you live in the wilderness.

The wilderness is all owned. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

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

#295

Post by paganholiday »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #160
muvlon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.

Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people. Our payment rails are so effective many people don't even read their credit card statements, they just have vampires draining their accounts monthly. Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-i…

Sure but modern cloud subscriptions have a lot of service layers you otherwise won't pay for so effectively you may be buying the hardware yearly that's a lot different than renting a media collection that would be assembled over a lifetime for the price of one new item a month.

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

#296

Post by lukeschlather »

voxleone wrote: post #175

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 economic…

I'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.)

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

#297

Post by shuntress »

pm90 wrote: post #73
lopis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I've seen described by some is that the industry is resistant to expand capacity right now, because a partial pop of the AI bubble is expected aaany time now for months, but it keeps not happening. But if it does happen and they have too much capacity, the whole GPU and RAM industry would not be able to recoup that investment and would collapse.

Western (+allied) firms should 100% be worried but they are in a difficult spot: risk losing out on market share or risk overcapacity. The Chinese have the full might of Federal/State Governments behind them which may allow them to survive overcapacity, not so for the western firms.

Can you clarify the point you are trying to make?

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

#298

Post by vel0city »

bee_rider wrote: post #275
jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people. Our payment rails are so effective many people don't even read their credit card statements, they just have vampires draining their accounts monthly. Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-i…

> The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection. I did Apple Music and Amazon Music. The experience of losing “my” streaming library twice totally turned me off these kinds of services. Instead I do Pandora, and just buy music when I (rarely) find something I totally love and want to listen to on repeat. The inability to build a librar…

I do wish these services would have an easier method to import/export playlists and collections. But that would make it easier to leave, so its not going to happen.

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

#299

Post by vel0city »

dangus wrote: post #269
mrweasel wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I think people are less likely to finance a computer, but maybe not, given that phone financing is a thing.

Just go to the Apple website and notice how every computer price has a monthly payment option in the same font size right under the purchase price.

Numerous places are advertising financing groceries and eating out these days.

https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/ways-to-pay/buy-now...

https://www.klarna.com/us/store/5130c1b0-9c21-4870-b7ed-b610...

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

#300

Post by mrweasel »

adventured wrote: post #242
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.

That's what people widely claimed about Uber: it was toast once the investor subsidies stopped. Now it's quite profitable. People will pay more. Claude Opus 4.5 is worth more than $20 per month, as is Gemini 3 Pro. These services keep getting better. Another three years of improvement, why shouldn't that command $30 or $40 instead? $20 is ~$10 in the year 2000 per the BLS inflation calculator (or $1.25 when priced in…

I think you're ignoring that most users of AI currently aren't paying anything, nor would they. I believe the value of a Facebook user was $70 per year in 2023, for the US and Canada. Assuming that the AI companies could make twice that from ads, that's still only $10 - $12 per month, and even less in the rest of the world. Obviously there's going to be some business users as well, so they can cover some of the cost, but would also be responsible for a larger portion of the running cost.

The question should be how many free users can the AI companies convert.

The cost of an Uber has also gone way up, and they basically have a monopoly in many areas.

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