AIBRIEF
The European cloud and hosting provider says memory costs have risen six fold, far above the 9 11% it forecast in March, with bills changing from September.
OVH Cloud, one of Europe's largest independent cloud and hosting providers, is warning customers of memory price increases of up to 87% on new 2026-edition gaming servers, with the changes flowing into bills from September 2026. The company says the hike reflects a six-fold rise in what it pays for memory, far steeper than the 9-11% average OVHcloud itself forecast on its own blog just five months earlier.
The Register reported Tuesday that OVH CEO Octave Klaba posted the figures on X earlier in August, calling the surge a "RAMpocalypse," a portmanteau of RAM and apocalypse. Klaba said memory procurement costs have risen 6x in the year to June, will hit 9x by September, and reach 12x next year; he also cited 7x increases for NVMe storage and 3.5x for HDDs.
Other new servers will see increases of 40-59%, while existing 2024-era customers face contract-renewal increases 3-6x lower than new-order pricing. From October 1, OVH will decouple storage and IP addresses from Gen3 instances and drop its 1-, 6-, and 24-month savings plans.
OVH blames the spike on HBM (high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators) demand pulling fab capacity away from DDR4 and DDR5, the standard server memory in OVH's catalog. Klaba expects the disruption to last into 2028, with a return to normal levels hoped for in 2029. The Register's unnamed mid-sized MSP founder expects Azure and AWS to make similar announcements soon, an anecdote, not a market-wide signal.