For most of 2026 the memory shortage was a chip-market story: analyst charts, contract-price forecasts, something happening two layers below the invoice. In late August it arrived on the invoice. OVHcloud, one of the largest hosting providers in Europe, told customers to expect renewal increases of up to 87 percent from September, and named the reason plainly: it is paying several times more for RAM than a year ago
What OVHcloud is changing
The increases are tiered by how new the hardware is. According to a breakdown reported by DataCenterDynamics on August 20, servers built on 2024-generation hardware rise by about 28 percent on average, 2026-generation servers by around 51 percent, and 2026-generation gaming infrastructure by the headline 87 percent. The changes take effect from September 2026
Two things soften the blow, and both matter for planning. Ongoing commitments are not touched: a subscription you have already paid for keeps its price until it ends, and OVHcloud is letting customers lock the current rate by paying upfront. The oldest ranges, including Kimsufi and Rise, are left unchanged. So the increase is aimed at new orders and renewals of the recent, memory-heavy lines, not at every line in the catalogue at once
Why RAM, and not GPUs
The interesting part is what is driving it. This is not an AI-GPU story in the usual sense. Founder Octave Klaba said the company was paying six times as much for RAM in June 2026 as a year earlier, expected to reach nine times by September, and was forecasting twelve times by early 2027. NVMe drives and hard disks have climbed too, by a smaller multiple. Processors, motherboards and network cards are up only modestly by comparison
The mechanism is that AI demand has drained the memory supply, and that repriced ordinary server memory along with it. A dedicated server with 32 or 64 gigabytes of plain DDR5 has no AI accelerator in it at all, yet its bill of materials is now dominated by a component whose price the manufacturers revise upward every quarter. Klaba framed it as a pass-through any hardware buyer faces: the cost lands immediately and in full, and a provider can either absorb it or move it into the price list
What it means in money
Percentages hide the number that matters, so put a figure on it. A recent-generation dedicated server that renews at 50 euros a month moves to roughly 75 euros at the 51 percent tier. A 2026 gaming server at 60 euros a month heads toward about 112 euros at 87 percent. That is not a promotional first-term trick that reverts later; it is the new standing rate for that hardware. For a project running two or three such machines, the step is a few hundred euros a month of new fixed cost, appearing in a single renewal cycle
The practical move before September is unglamorous but real: open every server you rent, read the renewal line rather than the order-page price, and decide which machines are worth locking at today's rate through an upfront term and which you would rather right-size or move. Plans with their specifications and last price-check date are in our catalogue, which makes the before-and-after easy to line up
Not only OVHcloud
This is a market event, not a single company's decision. Hetzner spent the first half of 2026 raising prices repeatedly, by up to about 50 percent on parts of its range, citing the same component crisis. When two of Europe's largest independent hosts move the same way within months, the cheap flat-rate dedicated server that held its price for years is quietly being repriced across the board. The providers still advertising last year's numbers are, in most cases, simply slower to update, not immune
For a buyer, the useful response is to stop comparing servers by the showcase monthly figure and start comparing by the price per gigabyte of memory, because memory is where the whole increase is concentrated. A plan that looks slightly dearer per month can be markedly cheaper per gigabyte of RAM, and in 2026 that is the axis the market is moving along. How we normalise plans onto that kind of metric is set out in the methodology
The figures here come from Octave Klaba's own posts describing the change, as reported by DataCenterDynamics on August 20 and analysed by InfoQ on August 23, 2026; the effective date and tiered percentages are OVHcloud's own