The AI boom is starting to reprice the hardware that has nothing to do with it. OVHcloud, the European cloud provider, will raise prices from September, with 2026-edition gaming servers up 87 percent and other recent servers up 40-59 percent.
Memory costs are the reason, and the numbers are stark. Founder Octave Klaba said RAM priced six times higher in June than a year earlier, after suppliers redirected production lines toward high-bandwidth memory for AI workloads. OVHcloud is passing the increase through in an unusually direct way: the hikes land on machines already in the catalog, not just new orders.
The ripples extend beyond OVHcloud. AWS, which buys memory years ahead, has repriced one reserved GPU product. For customers, the signal is that AI’s appetite for HBM is consuming the memory supply chain’s attention, and the bill for that shows up in everything from gaming boxes to general-purpose clouds.
Klaba framed the move as a necessity rather than a choice, arguing the market is repricing non-AI infrastructure to match the new cost of memory. For anyone running workloads that never touch a model, the message is blunt: the AI memory crunch is no longer someone else’s problem.
