Introduction
OVHcloud has just announced pricing revisions that will have more than a few CIOs grinding their teeth. Effective April 2026, increases range from 9% on new public cloud instances to 87% on certain dedicated gaming servers. The culprit: a global DRAM memory shortage that spares no one — not even Europe's leading hosting champion.
A Shortage of Unprecedented Scale
Behind these hikes lies a dynamic well known to IT teams: memory production is a constrained resource, and semiconductor manufacturers have massively redirected capacity toward the GPUs powering artificial intelligence workloads. The result: DDR4 prices have surged 158% since September 2025, while DDR5 has climbed 307%. OVHcloud CEO Octave Klaba has been upfront about the outlook, publicly projecting that RAM will cost between 250% and 300% more by end of 2026 compared to a year ago.
This is not an OVHcloud-specific problem. German competitor Hetzner is implementing average increases of 30% across Europe and up to 38% in the US market. The trend is structural: according to OVHcloud, new memory production capacity is unlikely to meaningfully relieve prices before 2028.
Sovereign Cloud Is No Longer the Pricing Safe Haven
For years, OVHcloud and its European peers were positioned — rightly — as a credible, cost-effective alternative to American hyperscalers. That price argument was solid. It is now cracking.
With 2026 VPS pricing climbing 43% to 74%, and gaming servers absorbing the steepest hikes, some configurations are now approaching the price levels of AWS or Azure on equivalent specs. The gap is narrowing — not because hyperscalers are cutting rates, but because European providers no longer have the margin to absorb component-level cost shocks one by one.
What This Means for Your IT Decisions
OVHcloud's response is nonetheless worth noting: rather than loading the entire cost increase onto new offerings, the company has chosen to spread the pressure across its client base by applying partial hikes on legacy servers (2% to 6% depending on hardware age). Customers were able to lock in multi-year commitments at legacy rates before the April 2026 cutover. That window is now closed.
For IT and FinOps teams, several immediate priorities stand out:
- Audit your current contracts: identify which servers are already billed at new rates, and which may still be eligible for negotiated commitments before the next renewal cycle.
- Revisit workload segmentation: gaming servers and high-memory instances are absorbing the hardest hits. Some workloads are worth migrating to architectures less dependent on raw RAM capacity.
- Explore the unaffected product lines: not all OVHcloud offerings are impacted. The Kimsufi and So You Start ranges, along with Object Storage and AI solutions, remain stable for now — and can cover secondary needs at controlled cost.
- Factor 2027–2028 into capacity planning: memory prices won't bottom out until new production capacity comes online. Waiting for the market to normalize without forward planning risks triggering a second wave of forced renegotiations.
The Reality of a Structurally Tight Market
This is not a temporary blip. Demand for memory in AI infrastructure is not going away, and semiconductor manufacturers have structurally reoriented their priorities. For businesses that built their infrastructure on European sovereign cloud — partly on the assumption of its price competitiveness — the signal is clear: the cost advantage must be reassessed service by service, rather than taken for granted. Affordable European cloud as a default was a reality of the 2018–2024 era. That chapter is closing.