As far as I know, which is very little generally, AWS doesn't bid. Prices are as advertised. Not sure if GCP is similar. Azure certainly does, though.

I know for a fact that AWS that AWS negotiates. My buddy used to work at Netflix and he told me that they got a really good rate for AWS that was not available to the general public.

They might not bid in the strictest sense of the word, but when the vendors are mostly 3 players (Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) you just ask each one for a quote. I don't see how functionally that is different from bidding.

Btw, I know there are other hosting providers out there (Rackspace comes to mind).

I can't think of any one of them that would be able to deal with Netflix scale without shitting the bed, missing features, or an almost unacceptable lead time as they build out infrastructure.

all the cloud vendors can offer holistic commits to give lower than list price. We're talking anywhere from X-XX% discount on a per service level.

Generally you need to have a certain amount of usage before companies will engage these discussions.

If you are looking to be acquired by someone like Walmart the you might as well build your infrastructure on GCP/Azure now!