AWS increased prices for its EC2 Capacity Blocks for machine learning last weekend.
Amazon Web Services has raised the prices of a cloud service for the first time in years. This concerns EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, a service that offers customers guaranteed GPU capacity for machine learning training.
Up to 15 percent more expensive
The price increase is approximately 15 percent, writes The Register. The hourly rate of the p5e.48xlarge instance, eight Nvidia H200 GPUs, increased from $34.61 to $39.80 in most US regions. In California, it rises to almost $50 per hour. Other variants received similar increases.
Capacity Blocks are intended for companies that reserve GPU capacity in advance for a specific period, to avoid training being halted due to a lack of resources. These are often large-scale AI projects with budgets of millions.
Exceptional
It is striking that AWS is traditionally known for price reductions or restructurings that lower prices. A direct price increase of a popular service is exceptional. Amazon states that the new rates are the result of short-term supply and demand patterns.