H100 GPU Instance Pricing On AWS: Grin And Bear It
The Next Platform, Thursday, July 27,2023
It is funny what courses were the most fun and most useful when we look back at college. Both microeconomics and macroeconomics stand out, as does poetry writing, philosophy, and religious studies despite the focus on engineering and American literature.
The laws of supply and demand rule our lives as much as the laws of electromagnetic radiation and gravity, and plotting out those pricing curves and seeing the effects of supply shortages and demand collapse, and the phenomenon of diminished marginal returns, was fascinating.
But when we started in the IT industry, the real illustration of supply and demand came from creating quarterly pricing guides for new and secondhand mainframe and minicomputer systems. And what we learned from this, among many things, is the concept that the price of a thing is what the market will bear. And sometimes, customers buying expensive and vital systems just have to grin and bear it because there is not perfect elasticity of demand and supply that makes all those curves as smooth as they looked in the textbooks. It gets jaggy, and sometimes, vendors are opportunistic and they charge a premium for capacity just because they can.