32 gb EC2 with Amazon Linux 2 AMI throws memory error for 9.6 gb Pandas dataframe

Question

I am using a 32 Gb EC2 (r5a.xlarge) with the Amazon Linux 2 AMI 2.0.20201126.0 x86_64 HVM gp2. Currently, my Pandas Data Frame has a shape of (36072, 36072) - which translat