> I think the high price is to amortize the Annapurna Labs acquisition and to pay for NRE.

I don't think that's a useful way to think about pricing a product or service. The price has to be driven by the market, not your costs, which means ultimately your costs have to be driven by the market as well or you're done for.

I suspect they're pricing this a little high because they don't have a lot of them yet, meanwhile plenty of people will pay a bit extra to get a chance to try this out and do proof-of-concepts on them. As long as the market created by the latter matches the availability due to the former, this will work out fine for Amazon. They can always lower prices as these become more mainstream. Novelty value can be real value.

Neither google nor microsoft have ARM CPU's yet, so there is as-yet no price competition.

Scaleway.

FOUR ThunderX cores for THREE € per month.

AWS offers one core for TWENTY $ and with the typical extra charges… excuse me but what the actual fuck?!?!

Only for situations where ARM is an absolute requirement, which are few and far between.

Linaro has an ARMv8 cloud, too: https://connect.linaro.cloud

Packet.net (bare metal cloud hosting vendor) have ARM instances.