My guess is that the popular US providers get a lot more traffic and are supply-limited. No point in lowering prices unless you can serve the traffic that will result.

Given that you can run quantized flash on 128g ram, and there's a heavy focus around it (DS4)... I'd say that it's pretty feasible for a decent amount of devs. Never thought I'd buy an MBP but here we are.

n.b. I can't use nonlocal models for a big chunk of my work, so there's that as well.

Capitalist competition at its finest