In early July, AWS raised EC2 Capacity Block prices 20% across its main GPU instance families. That is the second hike in six months, following a 15% increase on January 4. If you are on H100-based P5 instances, you are now paying $5.19 per GPU hour. B300 slots hit $14.04 per GPU hour. For a team running a p5e.48xlarge continuously, the January hike alone pushed the bill from $34.61 to $39.80 per hour. The July hike adds another layer on top of that. This matters because the compute story in 2026 has been running in two directions, and those directions are diverging fast. API Token Costs Fell. Reserved GPU Costs Did Not. If you are calling inference APIs, you are paying a fraction of what you paid two years ago. Per-token prices have dropped roughly 80% in 2026 alone and around 280-fold since 2022. Claude, Gemini Flash, and the latest DeepSeek models are all priced in a range that would have seemed impossible eighteen months ago. But that is API inference. If you are reserving GPU...