Amazon Web Services (AWS) will raise prices by about 20 percent from July for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, a key AI cloud service product, Business Insider reported on Friday.

AWS also raised prices for the product by about 15 percent in January.

EC2 Capacity Blocks is a service that lets companies reserve GPUs in advance to ensure workloads are not interrupted. Developers running large AI projects, such as large-scale model training or foundation model fine-tuning, mainly use it. AWS said it updates prices periodically based on supply and demand and that other options keep fixed prices.

Price increases for AI cloud services are spreading across big tech. A shortage of high-bandwidth memory supply is cited as the underlying factor.

High-bandwidth memory is a key component packaged with advanced AI chips. Limited output is becoming an obstacle to GPU production and data centre expansion.

Peter Berezin (피터 베레진), chief economist at BCA Research, said limits on memory supply create limits on GPU output and ultimately restrict the number of data centres that can be built. He added that with GPU capacity in short supply and customers lacking alternatives, hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle gain greater pricing power.