An analysis of recent price increases among the largest cloud providers shows the impact of AI on cloud services, and in particular, how the price of accelerators is having on rates.
This is according to Liftr Insights which over the past three months tracked the average price of accelerators, which are used to enhance and expand cloud capabilities. Prices have increased for the top cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Alibaba (Aliyun) Cloud, and Google Cloud. For example, when looking at certain NVIDIA GPUs, Azure is leading the pack with prices increasing by 55.2% in the past three months. Specifically, these percentages are based on average price for NVIDIA Tensor Core (Ampere) models. Google Cloud was the next largest at 20.0% followed by Alibaba Cloud and AWS at 3.5% and 1.2%, respectively.
A portion of these increases are due to higher core counts, but the prices for these in-demand accelerators also show growth when evaluating the average price per core.
"While we see many valuable data points in the prices across providers and across the globe, Liftr data show that cloud prices don't typically fluctuate to this extent," says Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. "It's a sign of the hot AI market. Accelerators—like NVIDIA GPUs—are the technology needed for artificial intelligence training and inference. Demand for AI is driving these price changes."
Among many attributes, Liftr Insights tracks on-demand prices for the top six cloud providers, representing over 75% of the total public cloud space. These prices are measured for all the unique configurations in Liftr Insights data, including numerous dimensions for processors and accelerators, such as global region, architecture, core count, and accelerator count as a few examples.
"This level of information is important for organizations needing to pay attention to their bottom line," says Schadt. "Particularly as they expand into new territories and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Our customers will be paying close attention to changes in the data as they occur."
