not a pulumi- or AWS-dev here, so take this with a grain of salt. But, I image that the nodegroup doesn’t provision nodes across subnets in a round-robin type style (which is what it seems like you’re assuming it does). Rather I bet it’s more like “first-come-first-serve’
So, if you want to ensure that they there are always nodes in different subnets, you could just use two different NodeGroups, which each have access to only one subnet