If you paid hourly (instead of using a reserved instance) it costs $116840.88 per year (13.338 per hour * 24 * 365). A 1 year reservation + hourly charges for a year is $67197.96 (all up front).
Every time I look at AWS, it just doesn't make sense from a financial standpoint (even after you add another machine for redundancy, and remote hands -- you're ahead after 12 months).
Having this type of instance available via an API call is within seconds is really cool.
(not that I don't understand that this could be said of many things, might actually be true in economic terms etc. It just never occured to me with other heavy machinery).