OVHcloud is raising prices across much of its catalog this autumn, and the driver is not a change in its own services but a surge in the cost of the memory and storage parts that power them. Founder Octave Klaba says the company is being squeezed by AI-driven demand that has redirected manufacturing capacity toward components for GPUs and high-bandwidth memory, leaving standard server hardware more expensive for everyone else.
OVHcloud says AI demand is reshaping non-AI cloud costs
Klaba laid out the situation in a post on X, where he said the shift began in mid-2025 and has accelerated since. According to his account, three global RAM suppliers have retooled factories toward high-bandwidth memory, which is used with GPUs and commands better margins, at the expense of ordinary DDR4 and DDR5 memory used in mainstream servers.
OVHcloud’s own purchasing data shows how sharply prices have moved. Indexed to June 2025, memory reached 604 by June 2026, SSDs 323, and hard drives 148. Klaba said the company was paying six times more for RAM in June 2026 than it had a year earlier, with prices expected to rise to nine times by September 2026 and perhaps 12 times by early 2027.
What is getting more expensive
The company says the pressure is not limited to RAM. Klaba added that NVMe drives are now seven times the price they were, hard drives are 3.5 times higher, and he has heard that CPUs, motherboards, and network cards could rise by 15% to 20%.
- RAM: 6x in June 2026 versus June 2025, with a forecast of 9x by September and potentially 12x in early 2027
- NVMe drives: 7x
- Hard drives: 3.5x
- CPUs, motherboards, network cards: expected to rise 15% to 20%
Which OVHcloud customers will pay more
The increases do not hit all customers equally. Renters of 2026-edition gaming servers face the steepest rise at 87%, while other recent servers will go up by 40% to 59% starting in September. Customers on 2024-era equipment will see smaller price increases at renewal, which Klaba said are three to six times lower than the price of a new order.
Older product families are being left alone for now. OVHcloud said Kimsufi, Rise, and earlier Advance and Scale generations were already affected by an April increase and will not be touched again in this round.
Some charges are being broken out instead of simply increased
From October 1, storage and IP addresses will become separate line items on Gen3 instances. The company set those charges at €0.000146 per GB per hour for storage and €0.0027 per hour for IP addresses.
OVHcloud is also dropping its one-month, six-month, and 24-month saving plans. It will keep the 12-month and 36-month options, which lock in pricing for their full term.
Why OVHcloud says it cannot absorb the pressure
Klaba was blunt about the company’s view of the situation. He said the market is “exceptional” and would last until 2028, adding that AI demand is “insane at every level” — from datacenters and GPUs to token-as-a-service and agentic AI. In his telling, the result is that “everyone wants it, everyone is using it,” and the pressure is falling on “every business that’s not AI.”
He also said OVHcloud’s priority is to avoid shortages. “The main concern we want to avoid is running out of parts and not being able to deliver the Cloud to you,” he wrote.
The company’s position is constrained by how it buys hardware. Klaba described OVHcloud as ordering month by month over a 12-month period, without guaranteed purchase prices and without a clear view of final customer demand. That leaves it exposed to component inflation in a way that larger hyperscalers are not.
How hyperscalers compare
The article contrasts OVHcloud’s situation with Amazon’s. Amazon has moved little in response to the same market, aside from raising EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, a reserved GPU product, by roughly 20% in July after a 15% increase in January. It left the rest of its catalog alone, including instances based on Trainium, its own accelerator.
Procurement scale and vertical integration appear to be the difference. Hyperscalers can contract for memory years ahead and in volumes that give them priority allocation. Providers buying merchant components on rolling orders have less leverage and less protection from supply shocks.
What customers and competitors may do next
Customer reaction has been mixed, but much of the frustration is about the frequency of the changes. On Reddit, one commenter, bammitscamm, said: “Not happy about this, especially after just raising the prices in April.” Others treated the situation as a market-wide problem, pointing to rising RAM and SSD prices, while one commenter said they were leaving for self-hosted hardware.
Some observers expect the pressure to spread. The Register spoke with a founder of a mid-sized managed service provider who was unsurprised by the move and expected Azure and AWS to announce similar increases eventually. Klaba made a similar hedge, saying his pricing claims hold “if our competitors don’t increase their prices.”
What it means for European cloud buyers
The pricing shift matters because OVHcloud competes heavily on cost, especially in Europe’s public sector and sovereignty-focused projects. Klaba said that where the company could once be “3x cheaper,” it will now be “2x cheaper,” assuming competitors do not also raise prices.
That narrows the business case for migrations that depend on low infrastructure costs. It also lands at a sensitive time for public-sector buyers, where jurisdiction, certification, and procurement rules already shape cloud decisions. If component inflation persists, cost advantages that helped sovereign providers win contracts could be eroded by markets far outside Europe’s control.
The bigger uncertainty is duration. Memory markets are famously cyclical and can fall as quickly as they rise, but OVHcloud says the current squeeze could last until 2028. If that proves accurate, a temporary hardware shock could reshape cloud pricing for several budget cycles.
Source: Original report
Was this helpful?
Explore more: DevOps Services More Cloud & DevOps Tech News
Last Modified: August 24, 2026 at 1:52 am
0 views
