Comment by Onavo

Well, somebody should recreate it. I smell a potential startup idea somewhere. There's a ton of "cloud cost optimizers" software but most involve tweaking AWS knobs and taking a cut of the savings. A startup that could offload non critical service from AWS to colo and traditional bare metal hosting like Hetzner has a strong future.

One thing to keep in mind is that the curve for GPU depreciation (in the last 5 years at least) is a little steeper than 3 years. Current estimates is that the capital depreciation cost would plunge dramatically around the third year. For a top tier H100 depreciation kicks in around the 3rd year but they mentioned for the less capable ones like the A100 the depreciation is even worse.

https://www.silicondata.com/use-cases/h100-gpu-depreciation/

Now this is not factoring cost of labour. Labor at SF wages is dreadfully expensive, now if your data center is right across the border in Tijuana on the other hand..