Thought Leadership
OVHcloud CEO Octave Klaba has warned customers to prepare for significant cloud price increases as providers face sharply rising hardware costs.
Klaba had already warned earlier this year of unavoidable price increases, citing the widely discussed shortage of memory components driven by demand for AI computing capacity. He has now revised his original estimate of 5 to 10 percent upward to more than 80 percent for some customers.
Klaba said the price OVHcloud pays for RAM had increased sixfold in the year through June 2026. It is expected to reach nine times its previous level by September and 12 times that level in 2027. But memory is not the only issue. Solid-state drives (SSDs) and even traditional hard drives have more than doubled in price over the past year.
Klaba expects prices to continue rising in the near future and blames AI, specifically the frantic race to build hyperscale AI data centers. “It is very frustrating for a company like OVHcloud to raise prices, because we are making a huge effort to remain as competitive as possible on pricing,” the CEO said in a detailed statement on X.
“But the global situation is forcing us to maintain very strict discipline simply to keep fulfilling orders. The real risk is being unable to fulfill orders and making expansions unnecessarily complicated.”
Price Increases Starting in September
The price increases will take effect in early September for new orders and in October for equipment already in production. The steepest increases will affect customers renting 2026-generation gaming servers, who will face an 87 percent price hike. Prices for other current-generation servers will increase by 40 to 59 percent. OVHcloud will also raise prices for customers renting 2024-generation equipment when their contracts come up for renewal, although the increases will be lower than those for the latest-generation hardware. “On average, that means an increase of 28 percent for the 2024 generation and 51 percent for the 2026 generation,” Klaba explained.
OVHcloud will also change its Public Cloud billing model. According to Klaba, this could add up to another 22 percent to customers’ costs. Klaba hopes the market will return to normal in 2029, although he acknowledged that it remains unclear what “normal” will mean by then.
(Editorial Team)
