Capital

OVHcloud Warns of Price Hikes Up to 87 Percent

OVHcloud will raise bare metal server prices by up to 87 percent from September 2026, citing RAM costs up 127 percent and storage up 89 percent. Europe's top-ranked sovereign cloud provider is not insulated from the AI hardware squeeze hitting AWS.

CapitalBy Servola Tech Desk2026-08-144 min read

AI-assisted, edited by humans. | Editor-in-Chief: Leon Soliman | Editorial standards

OVHcloud Warns of Price Hikes Up to 87 Percent

Key takeaways

OVHcloud chairman Octave Klaba told the trade press on August 11, 2026 that bare metal server prices will rise by up to 87 percent on the company's newest 2026-generation gaming tier, with a weighted average increase of roughly 28 percent across the full 2026 lineup; the increases take effect for new orders on September 1 and for renewals on October 1. Before assuming the worst headline number applies to your own contract, check which hardware generation and tier your servers actually run, because the same announcement leaves most 2024-generation equipment largely untouched.
The stated driver is component cost, not demand for OVHcloud itself: Klaba said RAM prices OVHcloud pays rose 127 percent and storage disk prices 89 percent since July 1, 2026, both traced to the same hyperscale AI buildout that is also straining GPU supply. That distinction matters for anyone diagnosing the increase: this is a raw materials shock flowing through a European vendor, not a sign that OVHcloud's own market position weakened.
Klaba's own words undercut part of the sovereign cloud sales pitch: 'even though our prices are increasing, we remain the cheapest on the market for bare metal and public cloud; where before we could be 3x cheaper, we will be 2x cheaper if our competitors don't increase their prices.' A price gap shrinking from 3x to 2x is still a real advantage, but it is a smaller one than the one European buyers signed up for.
For comparison, Amazon Web Services raised its EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, its reserved GPU reservation product, by roughly 20 percent on July 1, 2026, on top of a 15 percent rise in January, a cumulative 38 percent increase in six months on instances like the p5e.48xlarge. OVHcloud's top-tier bare metal increase of 87 percent is more than double that cumulative GPU figure, even though OVHcloud is selling general-purpose compute and storage, not the GPU capacity everyone has been watching for AI-driven price shocks.
OVHcloud currently holds the top score, 8.6 out of 10, among nine providers assessed under the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework operated by comparison.cloud, with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud all scoring below 4.5. That ranking measures legal jurisdiction, supply chain control and security certification, not exposure to global hardware markets; this price increase is the reminder that a sovereignty score protects a buyer from US jurisdiction risk, not from the same RAM and NVMe markets every cloud provider on earth buys from.

A Bigger Jump Than Anything AWS Has Announced

When AWS raises GPU reservation prices, it makes headlines because GPUs are the visible, scarce input everyone is watching. AWS's own combined increase across January and July 2026, roughly 38 percent on its P5 and P5e Capacity Blocks for ML, was treated as a signal that the AI compute market had entered a new pricing regime. OVHcloud's announcement on August 11, 2026 is larger in percentage terms on its top bare metal tier, 87 percent, and it is not about GPUs at all.

Klaba pointed to component costs that most cloud buyers never look at directly: system RAM and NVMe storage, both squeezed by the same AI data centre buildout pulling memory chip supply away from everything else. That is the less visible half of the AI hardware story. Everyone budgeted for GPUs getting more expensive. Few budgeted for the RAM inside a plain rental server following the same curve.

The Tier-by-Tier Breakdown

The increase is not flat. Newest-generation gaming servers rise 87 percent. High Grade servers built on AMD's Epyc 9005 line, with configurations up to two 96-core processors, rise 59 percent. Other 2026-generation tiers rise 40 to 49 percent, while the weighted average across the full 2026 lineup lands near 28 percent. Equivalent 2024-generation hardware rises 26 to 37 percent, a materially smaller jump. On the component side, optional RAM add-ons rose 127 percent and storage disks 89 percent as of July 1, 2026, ahead of the server price changes that follow in September and October.

Public Cloud instances, OVHcloud's on-demand virtual machine product rather than bare metal rental, see smaller headline increases of 1.4 to 21.9 percent effective October 1, but that date also brings a billing restructure: storage and IP address costs get unbundled from the base instance price, a change that raises the effective bill for many workloads even where the sticker price barely moves.

What the Sovereignty Score Does and Does Not Cover

OVHcloud's position atop the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework ranking, a score of 8.6 out of 10 against a sub-4.5 score for each of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, rests on criteria like French incorporation, in-house server manufacturing, SecNumCloud certification and legal jurisdiction outside US reach under the CLOUD Act. None of those criteria measure exposure to global component pricing, because sovereignty frameworks were built to answer a legal and political question, not an industrial one.

That is not a flaw in the framework. It is a gap in how buyers have been reading it. A procurement team that chose OVHcloud specifically to escape US jurisdiction risk got exactly what it paid for. A procurement team that also assumed sovereignty would mean insulation from AI-driven hardware inflation did not read the framework closely enough, because nothing in an 8.6 score was ever a promise about RAM prices.

The Decision in Front of Buyers Now

Klaba's own framing, that OVHcloud's price advantage over hyperscalers narrows from roughly 3x to roughly 2x if competitors hold their own prices steady, is the number worth watching over the next two quarters. If AWS, Azure and Google Cloud pass through their own component cost increases at anywhere near OVHcloud's rate, the relative gap holds. If they do not, because their scale gives them better hardware pricing or because they choose to protect market share, OVHcloud's cost advantage keeps shrinking even as its sovereignty advantage stays fixed.

OVHcloud is offering existing customers a way to opt out of the near-term increase: paying in advance before October 1, 2026 locks current pricing for up to four years. That is a real hedge for anyone confident in their capacity plans, and also a signal from OVHcloud itself about where it expects component costs to go next, since a vendor does not usually offer a four-year price lock on a product it expects to get cheaper.

Frequently asked questions

Why is OVHcloud raising prices by up to 87 percent?

OVHcloud chairman Octave Klaba attributes the increase to component costs, specifically RAM prices up 127 percent and storage disk prices up 89 percent since July 1, 2026, driven by the same AI data centre buildout straining memory chip supply globally. The increase varies by hardware tier, from 87 percent on the newest gaming servers to smaller rises on 2024-generation equipment.

How does this compare to AWS's own price increases?

AWS raised its EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, its reserved GPU product, by a cumulative 38 percent between January and July 2026. OVHcloud's top-tier bare metal increase of 87 percent is more than double that figure, even though OVHcloud is not selling GPU capacity, which suggests the component squeeze is hitting general-purpose server hardware harder than the GPU market that has drawn most public attention.

Does this affect OVHcloud's sovereign cloud ranking?

No. OVHcloud holds the top score, 8.6 out of 10, among nine providers under the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework, based on criteria like French incorporation, in-house manufacturing and legal jurisdiction outside US reach. That score does not measure exposure to global hardware pricing, so the price increase does not change OVHcloud's sovereignty ranking, only the assumption that sovereignty implies price stability.

What can customers do before the price changes take effect?

New orders are affected from September 1, 2026 and renewals from October 1, 2026, when storage and IP address costs are also unbundled from base instance pricing. OVHcloud is offering existing customers who prepay before October 1 a lock on current pricing for up to four years, which is worth evaluating against your own capacity planning horizon before the deadline.

The sovereign cloud pitch to European buyers has always had two separate promises bundled together: legal independence from US jurisdiction, and an implicit sense of insulation from the volatility of a market dominated by three American hyperscalers. OVHcloud's price increase does not touch the first promise at all; its sovereignty score and certifications are unaffected. It breaks the second promise cleanly, because the RAM and NVMe markets driving this increase are global, and no amount of French incorporation changes what a memory chip costs. Buyers who migrated for legal reasons lost nothing this week. Buyers who migrated expecting price stability just learned that sovereignty was never that kind of insurance.

OVHcloudOctave KlabaCloud PricingSovereign CloudRAM PricesAI Infrastructure

Europe Built the Digital Euro Cloud Without the US

OVHcloud and Scaleway, not AWS or Azure, run the digital euro's payment backbone by procurement rule. A July parliamentary vote just gave that rule a legislative timeline.

5 min read

Decisions

Datadog Beat Q2, Raised Guidance, Stock Fell 17%

Datadog raised full-year guidance on August 6, 2026, and its stock still fell about 17 percent because one customer cut usage. Here is the concentration test any platform owner can run on their own numbers.

6 min read

Decisions

The Third Pivot Was the Warning Magic Leap Missed

Magic Leap filed a WARN notice for 193 layoffs effective 1 October 2026, its fourth strategic pivot after $4 billion raised. The lesson is the pattern, not the pivot.

4 min read

← All articles