Likely both. AWS was often 70+% more expensive on GPUs for a while and remains typically the most expensive provider when put in competitive scenarios. Remember that for Microsoft, Google, and others cloud is their low margin fun side business… for AWS/Amazon cloud is their high margin business that makes money.

Whereas others are willing to loose a bit to get ahead in a competitive space like GenAI, AWS has been freaking out since if the cloud gets driven to a low margin commodity then Amazon is in big trouble. This they’ll do everything possible to keep the margins high, which translates to “realistic” pricing based on actual costs in this case. And thus yes seemingly hoping enterprises will buy some expensive second rate product so they can say they have customers here and hoping they don’t notice better cheaper offerings are readily available.

This is also a signal what what the “real cost” of these services will be once the VC subsidies dry up.