> train cars full of money to light on fire

Is there any indicator that these credits are actually "lighting train cars full of money on fire", as opposed to "selling product with a small instead of a huge markup"?

The cloud provider market seems too competitive for them to be getting huge markups; if there was a 50% margin on storage, why wouldn't Microsoft or whomever just knock 20% off and undercut all of their competitors thereby making them the obvious choice?

All three are totally dependent on cloud services to power revenue growth in the forseeable future. Amazon's retail efforts aren't where the big exciting growth for investors is, it's all AWS. Windows/Office has been stagnant for a long time, or even in decline. MSFT price only took off once Azure took off. And as for Google, well, what exactly are they doing that's new other than GCP? They've got nothing that can absorb growth at their scale.

If you look at the costs of the big 3 tech firm cloud solutions relative to what you can get from smaller providers, it's an enormous markup. None of them are going to compete with each other on price because that'd void the point of doing cloud to begin with. Plus tech firms hate competing on price. It signals to the market that you've run out of innovations.

It will be more interesting to see who is no. 1. (it may not be AWS)