The cloud companies do not make the hardware, they buy it like the rest of us. They are just going to be almost the entirety of the market, so naturally the products will built and priced with that market in mind.
That’s the main problem is a market owned by enterprise customers. Consumers don’t matter, there is zero interest is competing for them, they’re too little. The discounts is a killer for example, well have to buy from a reseller each time, who of course will pocket a good proportion of the discount because there won’t be many resellers that sell to consumers…
I have seen very large ent customers get 80% discount on hardware - it’s mind boggling that the vendor is not going bankrupt.
Not specific for GPUs but I believe some of those giant and deeply discounted buys are at/below typical cost because of volume. They allow the vendor to increase their OEM/manufacturing commits, or shift bins theyre long on, to improve the rest of their sales pipeline. Similar for very large last orders or all the remaining stock of a SKU which improves cash flow and turns over inventory. Its a very very different vendor relationship with things like defect rates, yield, and “warranty” turned in to price factors.
> I have seen very large ent customers get 80% discount on hardware - it’s mind boggling that the vendor is not going bankrupt.
Yes exactly. When I see what we pay for stuff at work...
Obviously the vendors don't have 80+% margins. So what do they do? Inflate the RRP to compensate. So they can give a huge discount that sounds good on paper.
But this makes it unviable to buy for consumers that do have to pay RRP.
Of course the vendor can't make a profit with such discounts so they inflate the RRP. But we do end up paying that.