We are talking about S3 not VPS/cloud, they don’t offer S3 in Asia or the US last I check, they do offer ceph Volumes for cloud servers, it’s the same price for every location.
Almost everyone hike their prices, even Digital Ocean.
Also the prices he was watching was dedicated resources, you can have better deals on shared resources, and checking with DigitalOcean, droplets are shared unless they are “Premium” the price is about the same but with less traffic.