The party of cheap cloud storage is over. After years of slashing prices to attract customers, the big three – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – have decided that it is time to start making real money. In early February, users have begun to notice a widespread rise in the costs of technical components and services, and the trend seems set to continue.
The official excuse is the massive investment they are making in infrastructure to support the new wave of generative artificial intelligence, which consumes resources as if there were no tomorrow. Although nobody says it openly, it seems that the era of aggressive offers and discounts has come to an end. Now it is time to pay the bill for innovation, and those who depend the most on the cloud are already crunching the numbers to see how it will affect their pockets.
