AWS Raises GPU Prices 15% on a Saturday, Hopes You Weren't Paying Attention
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As AWS quietly hiked GPU prices by 15% on a Saturday, the community sparked a lively debate about cloud pricing trends and the need for transparency. One commenter, lancekey, revealed they've been working on computeprices.com, a side project that tracks hourly GPU prices across clouds, sparking interest and suggestions from others, including adding a "Best Value" metric. The discussion also uncovered some surprising insights, such as the fact that prices for older GPU models tend to decrease as newer ones emerge, and the possibility that owning a GPU might soon be cheaper than renting one. With the cloud computing market becoming increasingly competitive, this thread sheds light on the intricacies of GPU pricing and the tools that can help users make informed decisions.
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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.
Would it be possible to add "Best Value" / "best average performance per dollar" type thing?
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.
- own the hardware, if you have constant load and have enough expertise (personally or a team) to use/maintain it at your required reliability level
- rent the cloud, if your usage is opportunistic/ spike’y/rapidly changing
- also rent the cloud, if required expertise/maintenance would cost you more than the hardware (if you want to have gazillion of nines, you need somebody who’s there to deal with smoking stuff, in several locations)
My question was (to what ozim wrote), how's that new in 2026
Paying runpod or vast or just about anyone else is _far_ cheaper than buying this hardware myself.
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.
I don't think we're seeing any decrease in supply though, ignoring 2020 I'm pretty sure the number of GPUs manufactured has been steadily increasing. It might be the case that projected manufacturing was higher than what actually happened, which is not the same thing as a decrease in supply, but companies like Amazon will talk about it like it is, and from the standpoint of their pricing it essentially is.
Sell the old-gen GPU's to on-prem users (including home consumers) who are going to run them a small % of the time (so power use is more or less negligible to them compared to acquisition cost), problem solved.
I'm convinced that anything with more than 80gb of VRAM will be worth it for closer to 10 years at this point.
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.
0: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/05/amazon-co...
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.
- 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.
> - RAM prices rising
> - hard drive prices rising
This is great news. It means the industry is expanding a lot and we'll be getting better consumer hardware at the end of the day. Innovation has always dropped down from the enterprise space to the consumer, as far back as the first electronic calculators and microcomputers.
The GPUs are generally rack-scale integrated units rather than PCIe. The bulk of the GPU RAM is HBM, so not very scavenge-able for consumer GPU mods. Power consumption of the blackwell GPUs in most solutions like the DGX B200 isn't really viable for home use even if you had the space and hookups for a fraction of the original 10ru system. The hard drives and SSDs will be likely be shredded on site and never re-sold as used. RAM will be registered ECC, only suitable for server-class motherboards.
This is here already. A long time ago, maybe even before covid, I asked a table of iPhone-owning friends who pays Apple a monthly sub for storage, and every hand went up.
I know you mention home computers, but most of my friends don't have one. Their iPhone is their computer.
That is... storage.
I also pay Hetzner for a storage box or whatever it's called, where I regularly send backups of my stuff with restic. One of the sources is a local fat ZFS NAS, which I can access from everywhere via wireguard.
Yet, the only reason I'm contemplating buying a new iPhone is to get larger local storage. I'm also biting my fingers for not having pulled the trigger on a larger SSD for my main machine two months ago.
Every solution has different use cases, and I think no single one is perfect. I get the best value from using a mix.
Tens of millions, maybe hundreds, buy the smallest hardware storage on offer (some friends even had 64GB) and pay Apple monthly instead.
My point is this: would they buy a phone that had next-to-no storage and rely solely on iCloud? Probably.
They also sell 1 TB iPhones and I think on the latest generation the minimum storage has been increased. If nobody bought them they wouldn't sell them (see the lack of newer "mini" models).
I always thought that these models with tiny storage and tiny ram (for laptops) where just so that they could hook you with a low "starting from" price.
My point wasn't that "nobody falls into apple's trap", I'm sure plenty do. Rather, unless you're sure your audience is representative of the "wider consumer market", just asking them if they pay for icloud and they say yes, it doesn't prove much.
Original source is paywalled but lifted quotes here:
https://www.idownloadblog.com/2024/08/21/cirp-survey-apple-i...
The smallest one is the cheapest, it's basic economics to assume that it sells the best. I would guess 60%+ buy the smallest, and I don't even need to look at data. You're welcome to disprove me.
The popularity of the storage subscription is basically why Apple is a $4tn company.
And, again, paying for cloud storage doesn't automatically mean that they do it because their local storage is too small for their needs. Apple pushed iCloud as a solution to safely back up your stuff, and I doubt nobody bought into this angle.
[0] https://telemetrydeck.com/survey/apple/iPhone/models/
Yes, with services such as storage.
The difference between a 512 GB and a 256 GB non-pro model is 250 Euros. The 200 GB icloud subscription (which, again, they don't talk about when buying an iphone) costs 2.99 Euros a month. Break even is in seven years. I bet many phones don't actually last that long. If you look at a 2TB plan (which doesn't have an equivalent phone) the break-even is 2 years.
It makes no sense to try to sell the cheaper iPhone in the hope that I'll buy some icloud storage, since they actually leave money on the table. Looking at pro models, the difference between the base 256 + 2TB icloud and 2 TB model has an even longer break-even period!
So, basically, it looks actually cheaper to get a smaller phone + icloud than a bigger one.
https://www.ft.com/content/3687fab7-3aea-4f81-9616-ed3d1f7be...
> Services are on track to make up a quarter of Apple’s revenue but as much as 50 per cent of its profit, said JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee, reflecting the “stickiness” of products such as recurring payments for iCloud storage.
Your rational take makes sense but the market disagrees. Apple cloud storage is very, very poplar.
And provided it doesn’t lose your stuff. Again, should be a core competency, but it has a track record of messing that up.
And arguably here, you’re trading one giant for a net-worse one?
I am aware of that, still doesnt stop people from speculation and therefor preventing others from buying.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LoveForLandchads/
There's a reason why a mortgage with very little down payment is a lot more than comparable rent.
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.
If 20 people need homes to live in and can’t afford to build them, suddenly landlords/investors have a place because they built housing inventory where others couldn’t. They won’t do that for free though and why should they.
I remember your username from prior threads, you’re a troll man. Take this crap to Reddit.
The nestle statements about profiting off people’s need for drinking water were universally viewed as disgusting. We shouldn’t always profit off the basic needs of other humans.
Propose pivoting our entire economy all you want, but do it in a way that doesn't cripple it and provides more than a one sided benefit masquerading as having no downside implications.
Yes. In fact, every developed country already does.
> you just removed profit from ~40% of GDP
Is the point of society to maximize profit all the time at the expense of other things, or to provide a good life for people and ensure their basic needs are met?
> provides more than a one sided benefit masquerading as having no downside implications
Of course there are downsides. Rich people will be less rich. Lower class people won’t be so easy to exploit. People will be happier and more content, so there will be less crime and less people in prison.
The fact you prioritize profits over people is both illuminating and horrific. What a terrible place you must live in.
I’m arguing for not just making one single law that X must be profit free as an entire industry without considering anything else. The government here would not provide housing. It would not invest in hospitals. It would not build universities. It would just ban them from being profitable and we’d all suffer because of the lack of supply that results. I think the difference here is I’m thinking if the practical implications of how it would be executed and you’re imagining some hypothetical scenario when it’s executed well. The fact other nations do it isn’t reassuring to me, precisely because we have proven time and time again that we will flat out refuse to look outward for ideas that are effective. We have to put our own stamp on it and mess it up, or just do nothing.
Respond to a point I actually made or go back to Reddit.
A landlord will happily swallow 50% of your income but a bank will start to feel bad about a ~30% debt to income ratio, so no you can't really.
Reminder that a 300k mortgage over 30 years at 5% costs you 600k in the end, so you're fucked either way, at best your kids might benefit from your investment.
Housing got way more expensive since the 2000s, most people are priced out of buying a house, most can't even qualify for a mortgage to afford an average house.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/34534.jpeg
The average Joe, well, median Joe in that case, living alone in say France/Germany/UK can barely qualify for a 200k mortgage over 30 years, and that won't get you much unless you plan on living like a student your whole life
It's almost as if the banks know they're very likely to lose money by approving loans people are statistically unlikely to be able to make 360 on-time payments for.
> Reminder that a 300k mortgage over 30 years at 5% costs you 600k in the end
100% true and stated this way makes it sound like it's the evil bankers, but really it's just the way math works.
> most people are priced out of buying a house
I don't think "most" is accurate here, especially if you include areas don't have insane NIMBY restrictions on building like SF and NYC.
This[0] shows there are absolutely places more affordable than others. My one complaint is that if everything gets more expensive the map doesn't really change so it could be better.
And I've heard the rebuttal before about "that's where the jobs are" (false) or "that's where I grew up." I get it, but living in high-demand places is not a constitutional right. Not having your own home in a major downtown metro is not a violation of your rights. If you can't afford to live somewhere, you should move. I'm in the 4th state I've lived in in my life right now. I might be here until I die, I might live in 4 more. Lots of things play into that but a major part of the calculus is whether or not I can afford to live the life I want here.
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-u-s-housing-affordab...
I was a landlord for a bit and what I’ve found is that tenants that have probably never actually owned a property have no ideas about what it cost to own a property and what the landlord is actually making off your rent. Sure even if you pay a few thousand in rent, it may be the landlord only has a couple hundred of cash flow. Then, one repair on the home can easily wipe out a year or more of that. One bad tenants can wipe out a decade of it.
I recall my worst tenants ever. Weren’t even that bad all things considered but the were dirty people. The house was filthy when they moved out. The walls and floors were coated in a grease like film. I had a no smoking policy in the lease but it was obvious they smoked and used the floor as an ashtray. There was a handful of other things that were just broken. Anyways it was a 4 bedroom house that was 2500 sf. I got a few quotes to paint and fix the list of little stuff. The cheapest quote I got was $15k but there was also a $20k and a $30k quote. I decided not to go after these people for the damages but I told them the long list of repairs and because of the condition and cost of repairing it all I would not return their deposit which was only about $2500. Anyway they completely lost it calling me a slumlord and how there’s no way they could have generated that much damage and reported me to the state and wanted to sue me but I don’t think they found a lawyer to take the case. They thought I was marking up all the repairs costs and scamming them. I just sent them all 3 quotes and told them I chose the lowest and wasn’t asking them to pay the excess (I knew it would just be a bad debt). But they went through every line item and said they knew what it cost to paint a house and it was overpriced. This is where the problem is. They’ve never owned a property, never hired a contractor or handyman so they actually have no idea what these things cost. And in my city, construction is booming and everything housing related does seem expensive but it is what it is. There’s no cheaper way to do it besides DIY. But my labor isn’t free either and I’d charge more for my time than the contractors do so that’s not really a solution either.
I love how I addressed both those things in my comment and you chose to ignore it or just didn't read
What? No. Explain to me how after putting 10% down, I was able to get out of PMI because I had 20% equity after the first 18 months of my mortgage? After all, at 18 months at 3.5% I've only paid down 2.1% of the principal. That's not how that works. Principal != Equity.
> The landlord is mostly taking on a huge risk in hopes the stars will align and 1) appreciation will happen 2) equity will be built
A "huge risk"? No, it's a pretty safe bet. Positive appreciation on home prices in the US has happened 28 out of the last 30 years.
And again, you build equity with each payment of your mortgage, 0.29% per month even factoring in that negative appreciation in, on average, 2 of the 30 years of your mortgage AND zero positive appreciation. Like I said, between May 2021 and November 2022 I was able to garner 4.8% equity due to appreciation alone (net zero I should have gained 5.2% - 18 months at 0.29%/month).
"Hoping the stars will align"? Come on now. Then why bother, if it's such a crap shoot that you're unlikely to ever make a profit on? Out of the sheer good of your heart? No.
Also, coming back to one of your original points:
> Sure even if you pay a few thousand in rent, it may be the landlord only has a couple hundred of cash flow. Then, one repair on the home can easily wipe out a year or more of that.
Then maybe you can't afford to be a landlord?
So there was appreciation, that's great but it's difficult to bank it until you sell the property. Investors usually don't qualify for sub 20% down so PMI is never even a factor. This is timing, which I've also explained. If you buy low and appreciation follows that's great, but it can also go the reverse which is a risk for an investor.
> A "huge risk"? No, it's a pretty safe bet. Positive appreciation on home prices in the US has happened 28 out of the last 30 years.
Positive appreciation is great. But it's doesn't always exceed inflation and if it does you have no control of that and are just hoping it does. I already mentioned it's timing the market in terms of appreciation. If you bought a rental in 2007, you likely didn't appreciate for a decade. That's a long time to have your money locked up and be exposed to risk for nothing. The money down, the risk of bad tenants, the risk of the government ban evictions, squatters, just normal risk of owning a maintaining a property (roof, foundation, plumbing, etc), so much more that you're ignoring.
> Then maybe you can't afford to be a landlord?
No, that takes us back to my original point of why landlords need to make a profit. They're not guaranteed a profit, almost no business is, but it needs to be a part of their calculus. That whole point is actually my counterpoint to your comment about how of landlords shouldn't have profit and are leeches and how they should be forced to sell there property to you after you rented it without risk for a few years - just get a mortgage if that's what you want. It's not the landlords fault if you individually can't afford to buy that property. Go live in rural Nevada, it's cheap.
At least some portion of utilities and tax charges pay for ongoing maintenance and investment to provide expected quality of life. Similar to how rent for a home eventually pays for a new roof or other repairs.
The profit margin component of rent is probably what most are referring to in this discussion, but presumably tax and (government owned) utilities don’t have that.
The wilderness is all owned. Trespassers will be prosecuted.
So if the upper middle and lower upper classes are being hollowed out...
Well... what's that leave? Just the super rich, and the rest...
And considering the way the super rich are acting, I suppose they're just fine with that. The morally bankrupt sacks of shit that most of them seem to be, or become...
And no system would give you property just because it would be nice, neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it and saw its destruction of everything good first hand - it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could).
Though the insinuation of such is routinely used to justify the ongoing stratification of wealth, and corruption of government.
Hard to say. The prevailing assumption, and basis for the Communist Party (on paper, at least), is that capitalists will try to block reaching a state of post-scarcity — the necessary precondition for communism. This is why they are sometimes considered to be at odds with each other.
They don't have to be. And thus far they don't seem to be. Capitalism, and especially American capitalism, has done far more to getting us closer to post-scarcity than anything else, with US-centric agriculture innovation being the shining example. We're almost there in that particular area.
But we're not there yet and things can quickly turn. It is apparent in that agriculture progress that the capitalists remain deathly afraid of losing control (see the tales of Monsanto, John Deere, etc.), which is exactly the foundation on which the assumption is built.
Uh, the American food industry, like nearly every first world food industry, is super state run. We stopped letting capitalism run farms because regular famine was awful.
Have you seen how much we pay per bushel of corn? Our beef is not cheaper because of capitalism. It's cheaper from enormous state subsidies that are designed to ensure we grow shitloads of certain crops regardless of economic or market factors.
But it stopped all the crazy boom-bust cycles of farming that kept ruining farms, harming farmland, and starving Americans.
Even food stamps is largely about giving farmers more state money for growing things that aren't strictly profitable.
The topic is capitalism. It only speaks to ownership. If you want to talk about who is running the show, you'd need to change the subject to command/market economies. But there is absolutely no reason to change the subject. So, getting us back on track: What agriculture-related capital do you think these first-world states own, exactly? The Canadian government used to own some grain elevators, but even that was sold off to private interests many years ago.
> Have you seen how much we pay per bushel of corn?
How could I not? What a curious question.
> It's cheaper from enormous state subsidies that are designed to ensure we grow shitloads of certain crops regardless of economic or market factors.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Post-scarcity, by very definition, is approached through technical innovation. There is a case to be made that subsidies have helped compel people to develop that technology, I guess, but subsidies and capitalism are in no way at odds with each other anyway. This seems to have absolutely no applicability to the conversation at hand.
Nobody is justifying anything here btw, I don't get why people hyperfocus on imperfections and claim whole thing is useless without understanding underlying reasons and thus options for fixes. Or providing long term working & proven alternatives.
Impossible. Communism is a work of science fiction, much like Star Trek which is a more modern adaptation of the same idea. Like Star Trek, the concept is dependent on post-scarcity, which we've never seen, and isn't likely to ever happen. Perhaps you mean you grew up under rule of the Communist Party?
> it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could
The defining features of communism are no class, no state, and no money. It imagines these will no longer be relevant in a post-scarcity world.
We can do better than play out the same conversations also happening in middle school cafeterias. It helps everyone and could even reinforce your opposing views on the matter. You do your entire ideological position a disservice just doing this old hat!
In the most capitalist places (rich areas without rent control), you can rent a place for years trying to save money to buy in the area and see the rent grow fast enough that you can't buy and even have to leave as a renter.
Capitalism seems to work well for transportable things though, including cars. A house isn't transportable and it also tends to be something quite unique, which makes it incompatible with production in series. Even if you are somehow authorized and able to buy a cheap home, you still have the issue of the terrain, which can be more expensive than the home.
That being said I'm sure that there are people living on cheap (per square meter) terrain and happy about it, but that requires the ability to make the best of it, work on it or find work close to it.
Perhaps that's the ultimate AI detector? Information too recent, too obscure or too useless to have been used to train language models?
What would be too obscure or useless, when every new model boasts increasing parameter count (as if having more parameters would make the models better after a certain threshold)?
But the current model is that we all rent from organisations that use their position of power to restrict and dictate what we can do with those machines.
There is a difference between choosing not to own something because it is personally more efficient or reasonable to do so, and being priced out of owning something. I don't own a car because I don't need it, I rent because I cannot afford a home.
People are by and large not that dumb. If they consistently choose a more expensive alternative, it means the cheaper alternative is missing something that matters.
> I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.
Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud?
Latency. 120ms extra latency makes many games uncomfortable, and some of them entirely unplayable.
I'm not sure where this sentiment even comes from but if the economy only consists of renters and landlords then we don't even have the thinnest veneer of capitalism anymore. We're just Feudalism 2.0.
i agree, for personal property, you indeed could have capitalism and deny private personal ownership, and that is a worrying trend nowadays.
Yes. Personal computing is dying if hardware vendors continue to cater to imaginary data centers for our imaginary AGI.
How else is grok going to generate semi-naked images of minors?
And as we've seen, once the market has been captured, they will start enshittifying everything to squeeze as much profit as they can and we'll have no alternatives.
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