OVH's warning of up to 87% server rental increases from September is the clearest sign yet that the HBM-driven memory shortage has stopped being a hyperscaler problem and become a line item on every UK infrastructure buyer's renewal notice. The maths behind it forces a capex vs lease recalculation this quarter, not next year.
View the data behind this chart
| OVH gaming servers | OVH other servers | Hetzner (industry) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price increase (%) | %87 | %59 | %50 |
What OVH actually announced
OVH CEO Octave Klaba confirmed the French cloud operator will raise server rental prices by up to 87 percent from September, with the steepest rises hitting customers on 2026-edition gaming servers. Other recently launched server tiers face increases of 40 to 59 percent, according to The Register.
Klaba said the changes are unavoidable given what OVH is now paying for components. He also confirmed that from 1 October, storage and IP addresses on Gen3 instances will be billed as separate line items at €0.000146/GB/h and €0.0027/h respectively, and that OVH is scrapping its one-month, six-month and 24-month savings plans in favour of 12- and 36-month commitments only.
The memory maths behind server rental cost inflation
The scale of the increase traces directly back to component pricing. Klaba said OVH's memory costs rose sixfold in the year to June 2026, are set to hit ninefold by September, and could reach twelvefold by 2027. NVMe drive costs are up sevenfold, hard disk prices have risen 3.5 times, and CPUs, motherboards and network cards are up 15 to 20 percent.
This is not an isolated OVH problem. Market analysis from SemiAnalysis, reported by Tom's Hardware, estimates memory will consume 30 percent of hyperscaler AI data-centre spending this year, with further repricing for 2027 not yet reflected in market forecasts. Buyers wanting to get an HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) explanation will see why AI accelerator demand is squeezing the conventional server supply chain, and can learn why AI servers are driving up costs due to HBM crunch.
Renewal timing is now the key UK data centre pricing lever
OVH's own framing gives buyers a practical clue: customers renewing existing contracts will see increases three to six times lower than those placing new orders, per Klaba's statement. That gap did not appear overnight — OVH signalled in November 2025 that some cloud services would rise 5 to 10 percent by mid-2026, with server acquisition costs climbing 15 to 25 percent over the same period, according to earlier Register and TechRadar reporting. The scale of the current announcement shows that forecast was conservative.
The pattern is echoed elsewhere. Hetzner has already raised prices by 30 to 50 percent across Germany, Finland, the US and Singapore, per DataCenterDynamics, and OVH previously warned that a server built in December 2026 could cost 15 to 25 percent more than the same specification built a year earlier. A mid-sized managed service provider founder told The Register he expects Azure and AWS to make comparable announcements soon — echoing 2022, when OVH's roughly 10 percent hikes drew little pushback because they were framed as industry-wide, alongside AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Capex vs colocation TCO: recalculating the buy-or-rent decision
For UK buyers who have treated public and specialist cloud as the low-friction default, this changes the arithmetic. A rental price that can jump 40 to 87 percent at renewal, on top of storage and IP unbundling, erodes the flexibility premium that made leasing attractive in the first place. It is worth running the numbers again to calculate cloud vs. on-premise TCO using current component pricing rather than last year's contract rates.
Where capital budgets are tight, it is also worth exploring how staged capex can be funded rather than deferred indefinitely — buyers can explore IT finance options to smooth the cost of owning hardware across a multi-year cycle instead of absorbing repeated rental step-ups. For workloads that do not need the newest silicon, it is also worth comparing options to browse refurbished servers and to understand new vs. refurbished server economics amidst DRAM shortage pressures, since refurbished memory and drive stock is not exposed to the same multiplier increases hitting newly manufactured components.
What UK infrastructure buyers should do now
Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami has said the memory chip shortage is making bare metal cloud infrastructure cheaper than on-premises deployments, according to DataCenterDynamics. OVH's own outlook is blunter still: Klaba expects the situation to last until 2028, with a return to normal only hoped for in 2029.
Practical steps for procurement teams include locking in longer commitment terms before September where contract terms allow, auditing whether existing hardware qualifies for the lower renewal uplift rather than a fresh order, and separately costing storage and IP charges that are being unbundled from base compute pricing. Anyone specifying new hardware should also revisit component choices directly — reviewing server memory and RAM options and SSD and NVMe drive options against current lead times will matter as much as the rental contract itself.
- 01The Register — OVH Cloud warns of 87% price hikes to help it cover RAMpocalypse costs · 11 August 2026
- 02The Register — OVH CEO predicts some cloud prices to rise 5–10 percent · 24 November 2025
- 03TechRadar — OVH boss predicts major cloud price rises are coming · 24 November 2025
- 04DataCenterDynamics — German cloud firm Hetzner hikes prices by up to 50 percent · 1 January 2026
- 05DataCenterDynamics — Memory chip shortage makes bare metal cloud cheaper than on-prem, says Nutanix's Ramaswami · 1 January 2026
- 06Tom's Hardware — Memory will consume 30 percent of hyperscaler spending this year · 1 January 2026
- 07The Register — OVHcloud set to make bank from November price hike · 27 October 2022