A few months ago, there was a lot of news lambasting tech companies for extending the depreciation lifespan of GPUs from ~3 years to ~5 years. Do these price hikes suggest a longer lifespan is probably the right way to see how long these GPUs will be valuable?
it's last call to get a GPU while there is stock left, no hopes those will become any more affordable in future considering the ongoing DRAM crisis. I am going to get 5070 Ti to replace my 1080 Ti which did a great service over all these years, paid it's worth back two times over during monero mining days and still can play a lot of games on high settings - recently finished RDR2. I sometimes wonder if Nvidia will be still making GPUs useful for gamers in a year or two or just completely shift it's focus to AI accelerators regular people will have no use for. RIP affordable computing at home.
They increased the price of capacity blocks, not on demand. Capacity blocks pricing was promotional with a well defined end date from the day 1. And it was even lower than spot instance lot of times.
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.
Also check the agenda 2030. The European digital wallet. The cyberscore.
All those elements together makes a digital Europe (and more) where there's no cash anymore, where your website has to be compliant to be working with EU's ID and payments systems.
It's going to be all centralised and about subscriptions, no matter if it's about your electricity bill or your groceries.
I think NVidia already decided they have all the power when the decided to add 100h limit to their GForce Now service, with that limit getting effective for legacy plans right now. It would be bad if people like they service so much that they avoid buying overpriced hardware :D
> 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.
Don't you worry! R* is already selling one (albeit optional) [1]. it is expected to be there from day 1 in their next title. perhaps this could become closer to reality once the current subscription becomes commonplace.
Body: The change had been telegraphed: AWS's pricing page noted (and bizarrely, still does) that "current prices are scheduled to be updated in January, 2026," though the company neglected to mention which direction.
These do not seem entirely consistent?
.
> This comes about seven months after AWS trumpeted "up to 45% price reductions" for GPU instances - though that announcement covered On-Demand and Savings Plans rather than Capacity Blocks. Funny how that works.
Assuming I found the right pricing page(s), this new increased price is still lower than those other prices that were lowered.
Yeah, and I doubt that this is the last price hike. But I don't think this actually has a whole lot to do with ram prices. The thing is, AI cloud providers have generally been running at a massive loss, if you do the napkin maths, the procurement cost of these machines is equivalent to approximately a year of rent at these rates, for normal servers at AWS it is approximately a month.
The “hopes you weren't paying attention” part of the headline seems needlessly inflammatory. All I see is demand rising into a supply-limited market (GPUs and RAM). That doesn’t seem nefarious, just high-school economics.
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.
Maybe it might be a good idea to squash it with any legal avenue, especially antitrust and data privacy laws that require reasonable and non discriminatory access by end consumers to self-maintained and self-hosted infra?
So rather than free market capitalism where AWS would have actually lowered prices after investing heavily in a new datacenter-focused line of Huawei GPUs, the US government took steps to stop capitalism and competition, gave NVIDIA lots of free money (USA! USA!) and now prices are going up.
Recall pictures of Bezos smiling at various Trump events.
Everything Trump admin has done so far with tech reduces competition and tries to pick winners. This price increase is just the beginning.
Everything is getting monopolized (oligopolized) for rent extraction! Homes, healthcare, energy, compute. 'Capitalism' FTW! Coming up next: water, air.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 78.2 ms ] thread- 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.
Also check the agenda 2030. The European digital wallet. The cyberscore.
All those elements together makes a digital Europe (and more) where there's no cash anymore, where your website has to be compliant to be working with EU's ID and payments systems.
It's going to be all centralised and about subscriptions, no matter if it's about your electricity bill or your groceries.
I think NVidia already decided they have all the power when the decided to add 100h limit to their GForce Now service, with that limit getting effective for legacy plans right now. It would be bad if people like they service so much that they avoid buying overpriced hardware :D
And thank god for that.
Don't you worry! R* is already selling one (albeit optional) [1]. it is expected to be there from day 1 in their next title. perhaps this could become closer to reality once the current subscription becomes commonplace.
[1] https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-plus/benefits
Body: The change had been telegraphed: AWS's pricing page noted (and bizarrely, still does) that "current prices are scheduled to be updated in January, 2026," though the company neglected to mention which direction.
These do not seem entirely consistent?
.
> This comes about seven months after AWS trumpeted "up to 45% price reductions" for GPU instances - though that announcement covered On-Demand and Savings Plans rather than Capacity Blocks. Funny how that works.
Assuming I found the right pricing page(s), this new increased price is still lower than those other prices that were lowered.
So long for amazon’s “earn trust” leadership principle
Buy your own hardware while you still can.
Maybe it might be a good idea to squash it with any legal avenue, especially antitrust and data privacy laws that require reasonable and non discriminatory access by end consumers to self-maintained and self-hosted infra?
Recall pictures of Bezos smiling at various Trump events.
Everything Trump admin has done so far with tech reduces competition and tries to pick winners. This price increase is just the beginning.