AI has driven memory prices up sixfold – and it is starting to reach your hosting bill

OVHcloud has told customers that prices go up from September. The Register reports rises of 87% on its 2026-edition gaming servers and between 40% and 59% on other recent machines. Customers renewing an existing arrangement fare considerably better – those increases are three to six times smaller than for new orders.

From 1 October the company also starts billing storage and IP addresses separately on some instances rather than including them, and it is withdrawing its one-month, six-month and 24-month commitments, leaving 12 and 36 months.

The reason its chief executive Octave Klaba gives is the cost of the hardware itself. Memory has risen roughly sixfold in the year to June, he says, and he expects nine times by September and twelve times by 2027. Fast storage drives are up sevenfold, ordinary hard drives three and a half times, and processors, motherboards and network cards by 15 to 20 per cent.

Who this affects

Far more businesses than are OVHcloud customers, which is why it is worth a few minutes even if you have never heard of them.

The underlying cause is not one company’s pricing. Memory manufacturers have redirected their production lines towards the specialist memory that AI servers need, and that capacity is already sold out for this year. Tom’s Hardware reports contract prices for ordinary computer memory rose 90 to 95 per cent in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with the squeeze expected to continue into 2027.

In practice that reaches you in three places: the price of new laptops, desktops and servers; the cost of renewing hosting or cloud services; and the quotes for any project involving new hardware. One managed provider told The Register he expects the large cloud companies to announce similar rises before long.

What to do about it

• Find out when your hosting and cloud agreements renew. If a renewal is due, this is the year to know the date rather than discover it on an invoice.
• Consider committing for longer where you are confident. Longer terms are being priced more kindly than short ones, and OVHcloud has just removed its shortest options entirely.
• Bring forward hardware you were going to buy anyway. If a machine is due for replacement in the next year, buying sooner is likely to be cheaper than buying later. That is not a sales line – it is what the memory market is doing.
• Specify what you need, not what is generous. Memory is the component driving this. Doubling it “to be safe” costs meaningfully more than it did a year ago.
• Have a look at what you are already paying for. Machines nobody uses and storage nobody has opened get more expensive at exactly the same rate as the ones that earn their keep.

Worth putting in the budget now

This is not a security warning and there is no deadline attached – it is a cost that is drifting upwards while nobody is looking at it, and the businesses that handle it well will be the ones that saw it coming a quarter early rather than a quarter late.

If you would like to know what your renewals look like, or what a hardware refresh would cost at today’s prices before it becomes next year’s prices, we can put real numbers in front of you. That is everyday work for our cloud services and IT infrastructure teams, and you will hear back in about 15 minutes on average.

Call us on 01202 237 273 or book a call.