I suspect that Amazon is starting to take advantage of the lead it got from being a loss leader in so many markets.

Amazon the store is effectively a loss leader I think for stuff like AWS, since people go "Oh, if the largest store in the world uses this hosting, we can use it for our business/government/project".

I've seen it a lot in the past 5 years, where things they couldn't possibly have been making a profit sending to our house (like groceries) went way up and now local stores make more sense. A lot of stuff where they still have a price advantage is basically just because they're a marketplace for direct factory sales from places like China.

If people like me and a lot of others are correct, we might be facing a period of extreme uncertainty and likely big recession. Amazon would be quite sensible to get in front of that and start cutting now so they don't need to take the pain at the same time everyone else is. Ford made a similar move prior to the 2008 financial crisis and that ended up being a great move for them in the medium term since they didn't need to be bailed out like GM. I wouldn't be surprised to see more competition in the AWS space in such a situation because platforms like that are actually pretty expensive compared to a few servers. I know if I were a CIO or CTO and my choice was to keep my staff and spend some capital or keep using AWS, in a downturn I'd be looking pretty carefully at on-prem for a lot of things.