Amazon raises reserved AI chip rental prices by about 15%

Customers reserving Nvidia chips through Amazon’s EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML face an approximately 15% price increase. Amazon announced the change with updated rates scheduled for the week following October 2, 2026, according to MarketWatch reporting cited by Quartz.

A higher price for reserved Nvidia capacity

Capacity Blocks lets customers reserve access to Nvidia chips ranging from the older A100 to the newer B300. The pricing announcement concerns that reservation service, rather than a purchase of the chips themselves. Its hardware selection spans several Nvidia chip generations, not just the H100.

The bill has two components: an upfront reservation fee and an operating system fee, according to Amazon’s pricing information cited by Quartz. That separates the payment structure from the hourly rate used to describe an instance: an hourly listing does not mean the reservation fee is collected one hour at a time.

$41.528 per hourp5.48xlarge instance

The instance runs eight Nvidia H100 chips and was listed at this rate in major U.S. regions ahead of the scheduled price update.

Reading the hourly figure

The listed price covers the whole eight-chip instance. Dividing it by eight yields $5.191 per chip-hour, a calculated equivalent rather than a separately quoted single-chip rental offer. Multiplying the instance rate by 24 gives $996.672 for a day’s worth of hours, before accounting for the separate operating system fee.

For a budgeting illustration, applying exactly 15% to that hourly listing would add about $6.23, bringing it to roughly $47.76 per hour. Those are calculated figures, not Amazon’s confirmed replacement quote for this instance; the announced increase is approximate. The revised instance rate will determine the actual dollar change for that configuration.