Amazon Web Services has raised the price of reserving AI GPUs by about 20%. It marks the second such increase this year as AI demand outpaces supply. The new pricing takes effect July 1.
The hike hits a service that lets businesses book NVIDIA GPUs in advance. Companies use it for large training and fine-tuning jobs. It follows a 15% increase in January, making reserved AI compute far costlier in six months. The change affects only reserved Capacity Blocks for ML.
AWS confirmed the move after Business Insider first reported it. The company said pricing is reviewed periodically based on supply and demand. Other GPU buying options stay at current prices. Amazon’s own Trainium AI chips are also unaffected.
Amazon is not alone, and that is the point. Apple raised prices across its Macs and iPads this week, blaming memory, and Xbox did the same. A shortage of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, now limits GPU production. That memory is a key component paired with advanced AI processors. What was once a software challenge has become a hardware bottleneck.
With memory output capped, fewer GPUs can be built. That slows the global build-out of AI data centers.
“As there is a limit to how much memory can be produced, then there is a limit to how many GPUs can be produced, which means that there’s a limit to how many data centers can be built,” Peter Berezin, chief economist at BCA Research, wrote.
The higher prices will hit startups and large firms alike. Many depend on AWS to train and run their AI models. As the world’s biggest cloud provider, AWS supports thousands of AI services. So even a narrow price rise can ripple across the industry.
Analysts say tight supply hands AWS more pricing power. Microsoft, Google, and Oracle gain the same leverage as alternatives shrink. The pressure extends beyond cloud computing too. Memory shortages have also pushed up prices for Macs, iPads, and Xbox consoles. For AI builders, reliable GPU capacity keeps getting costlier.
