The P6e pricing remains the same at $761.904 for 72 B200 accelerators in the Dallas Local Zone for p4d.24xlarge.
“The most defensible explanation is simply market-based pricing tied to supply and demand,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO at EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting. “As the demand for H100 and H200 GPUs outstrips supply, AWS is effectively applying a scarcity premium to guaranteed inventory. AWS is trying to recover higher infrastructure and capital costs from urgent capacity rather than overall capacity.”
Guaranteed GPU capacity becomes the new battleground
Guaranteed access to GPU clusters enables enterprises to de-risk AI infrastructure planning and build resilience against future supply volatility. Acknowledging the steep demand for high-end GPUs resulting in a shortage of Nvidia H100 and H200s, big clouds are increasingly offering guaranteed capacity to customers.
Other than AWS, Google and Microsoft also have similar offerings, but presented in more traditional reservation models and scheduling frameworks.
For instance, Google Cloud has introduced a calendar-based scheduling tool that lets customers reserve GPU capacity in fixed blocks ahead of time. “On paper, that looks a lot like what AWS is doing with Capacity Blocks. But the framing is different. Google is treating it as part of its broader resource scheduler, not a premium SKU. The guarantee is still there, but the pricing doesn’t feel as segmented or dynamic. It’s almost as if they’re using scheduling to compete, not price. And because they can also steer some workloads onto TPUs instead of GPUs, they’ve got a little more flexibility built into the system,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO and chief analyst at Greyhound Research.
Azure, on the other hand, leans more on regional capacity reservations. Gogia added that these allow customers to hold specific VM types in specific zones, but they tend to favour long-term planning and big enterprise commitments. They get guaranteed capacity, but often pay for the privilege of holding those resources, whether they use them or not. It’s a different kind of premium, less about price per hour, more about time and commitment.
