We all know that AWS is expensive. But it used to be that it was by far the best hyperscaler and had the appeal of being novel. AWS profits reflected that.
Now that it’s been around a while, the bloom has come off the rose. There are now solid competitors (especially Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) and enterprises are starting to move their infrastructure back to their own data centers.
Certainly, the rapid growth of cloud infrastructure over the past decade had to slow down. We have reached that point. Cloud is merely another tool for deploying computing loads rather than a strategy.