OVHcloud is preparing a significant price revision that will affect both new orders and some existing servers. The European company attributes the adjustment to the rising costs of RAM and storage, a problem directly linked to the demand generated by artificial intelligence. The increases will take effect on September 1, 2026, for new contracts and starting October 1 for certain existing equipment, with hikes that can reach up to 87% on the latest generation Game configurations.
The key points of OVHcloud’s price hike in 30 seconds
- New Bare Metal servers will see price increases starting from September 1, and some existing equipment from October.
- The 2026 generation is expected to rise by an average of 51%, while the 2024 generation will increase around 28%.
- Game 2026 can see jumps of up to 87%, and High Grade up to 59%.
- RAM and storage are the components putting the most pressure on costs.
- Public Cloud prices will not directly increase compute costs, but separating storage and IPv4 can make some instances up to 21.9% more expensive.
This move is particularly noteworthy because OVHcloud had previously anticipated a much more moderate impact. In March, its CEO and founder, Octave Klaba, estimated that the company’s overall cloud price increase between 2026 and 2028 might be limited to around 9%-11%, despite certain memory component prices potentially rising much more. Market developments during July and August have now prompted a revision of those forecasts.
The issue is not limited to OVHcloud. Global memory production is undergoing a reconfiguration driven, among other factors, by the massive growth of AI data centers and the focus on higher-margin products like HBM memory. This pressure is also reflected in DDR5, NAND, and enterprise SSDs used by conventional servers.
The 2026 generation experiences the largest increase
OVHcloud differentiates the impact based on hardware age.
Servers based on 2024 platforms will see an average increase of nearly 28%, while the 2026 generation servers will rise around 51% on average, according to Klaba’s figures.
Significant differences exist depending on the product line within that average.
The Game 2026 servers will be the most affected, with increases of up to 87%. These systems are aimed at hosting video games and other loads sensitive to CPU frequency, utilizing AMD Ryzen 9000 X3D processors and DDR5.
The Advance 2026 family will increase by about 49%, while Scale will see around 40% hikes. High Grade configurations, intended for virtualization, databases, and other high-availability enterprise workloads, could see increases of up to 59%.
In February, OVHcloud announced its new Bare Metal 2026 generation based on AMD Ryzen and EPYC Zen 5 processors, with configurations reaching hundreds of cores and multiple terabytes of RAM.
This detail helps explain why the most modern machines are impacted more.
In servers with 128 GB, the additional cost of memory can be absorbed within the total price. However, in configurations with 1.5 TB or 3 TB of DDR5, any price increase per module quickly multiplies.
Back in March, OVHcloud provided some clear examples. For instance, upgrading RAM to 1 TB in one of their Scale servers increased costs from €560 to €1,368, and a 3 TB setup went from €1,840 to €4,504 monthly solely due to RAM expansion.
Not all of these figures necessarily reflect the new September tariff, but they illustrate the scale of the hardware cost changes.
RAM prices had already surged up to 127%, and disks up to 89%
The adjustment is not starting now.
On July 1, OVHcloud already adjusted prices for certain hardware upgrades in new servers. In some cases, additional RAM costs increased up to 127%, and storage costs up to 89%.
From October 1, these changes will also affect server renewals.
For newer platforms, additional memory might increase by another 40%, and larger disks by about 15%. For 2024-generation equipment, the communicated figures are more moderate—about 20% for RAM and 10% for storage.
The company has been explaining for months that its procurement costs have become much less predictable.
Klaba describes a situation where OVHcloud has to reserve hardware months in advance without knowing precisely how much it will pay for RAM and storage or how much volume its clients will request.
For a cloud provider, this combination is particularly uncomfortable.
Buying excess hardware at high prices can lead to unused capacity. Buying too little can cause server shortages when a customer wants to scale their infrastructure.
OVHcloud expects this pressure to continue through 2027 and 2028, with a possible return to greater normality around 2029. In March, the company already estimated that certain RAM prices could end 2026 between 250% and 300% higher than September 2025.
Public Cloud will see more changes in billing than in compute prices
The strategy for Public Cloud will differ.
OVHcloud will not initially implement a similar increase on hourly compute prices. Instead, it will modify the composition of some Gen3 instances.
Until now, some instances included resources like low-latency block storage and IPv4 addresses in their price. Starting October 1, these will be itemized separately.
This allows customers to choose storage separately from the virtual machine size, but it may also cause some configurations to become more expensive.
According to OVHcloud, the actual increase could be around 1.4% for large instances, and up to 21.9% for smaller ones, depending on configuration.
The reason is straightforward: an IPv4 address or a certain amount of storage represent a proportionally larger part of the price of a small instance compared to a machine with dozens of vCPUs and hundreds of gigabytes of RAM.
The new structure also reflects a broader industry trend: charging resources separately that were previously bundled together within the instance.
OVHcloud will continue offering 15% discounts for one-year commitments and 30% for three-year commitments, while discontinuing some shorter-term discounts.
Current clients can try to lock in prices for four years
Companies with active servers have an option to mitigate the immediate impact.
According to Klaba, OVHcloud will allow locking in current prices for certain servers for up to four years if the customer pays in advance before October 1.
Existing commitments will also retain their current pricing until renewal.
This may lead to unusual decisions in cloud infrastructure: paying several years of costs upfront to protect against potential further hardware inflation.
It’s not necessarily a suitable decision for every company. Paying four years in advance reduces flexibility and carries the risk of remaining tied to hardware that might become outdated before the end of the period.
But for stable workloads, high-utilization servers, and organizations well aware of their capacity needs, this risk protection could be valuable.
AI is starting to increase costs even for servers that don’t run AI workloads
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of OVHcloud’s decision is outside its own catalog.
A customer can order a dedicated server for a database, a web platform, a Proxmox cluster, or any other workload without using a single AI model and still end up paying more because of AI-related supply chain pressures.
This occurs because part of the supply chain is common.
Memory manufacturers are dedicating more capacity and resources to HBM and AI server products, where margins are especially high. At the same time, new data centers require enormous amounts of DDR5, NAND, enterprise SSDs, and other components.
The result is an indirect competition for industrial capacity.
Cloud providers that renew thousands of servers each year face this pressure first because they need to buy large volumes continuously.
Furthermore, OVHcloud’s reliance on aggressive-priced Bare Metal servers means that when components represent a large percentage of the monthly fee, absorbing double- or triple-digit increases over years becomes very difficult.
Klaba states that, even after the new adjustments, OVHcloud will remain competitive and that the gap with some rivals will narrow from about three times cheaper to twice as cheap, provided these competitors do not also change their tariffs. This is a commercial claim and will depend on individual configurations and providers.
What’s important is that the market is shifting.
For years, cloud prices benefited from increasingly affordable components and servers capable of offering more capacity per euro with each generation. The explosion of AI is temporarily disrupting that trend.
And OVHcloud’s price increases send a particularly clear signal: the rising costs of AI infrastructure are already affecting bare metal, virtualization, and traditional workloads that don’t even use GPUs.
Frequently Asked Questions
When will OVHcloud raise its server prices?
The new prices will apply starting September 1, 2026, for new contracts. Some currently active servers will see adjustments from October 1, usually coinciding with their renewal conditions.
Which OVHcloud servers will increase the most?
The Game 2026 series could rise up to 87%, High Grade up to 59%, Advance approximately 49%, and Scale around 40%, according to Klaba’s figures.
Will Public Cloud also increase?
Compute costs will not increase directly in the same way, but OVHcloud will separate storage and IPv4 from some Gen3 instances’ pricing. The overall impact may range from approximately 1.4% to 21.9%, depending on the configuration.
Why are prices going up?
OVHcloud mainly points to the sharp rise in RAM and storage costs. The increasing demand for AI infrastructure is boosting memory consumption, while manufacturers prioritize higher-margin products, reducing availability for other segments.
