OVH Founder Octave Klaba Predicts 5–10% Cloud Price Increase in 2026 as RAM & NVMe Costs Rise

To be clear, cloud pricing will likely continue to rise, and this isn't what anyone wants. OVH founder Octave Klaba said that cloud pricing could increase by 5-10% in 2026 due to the rising price of RAM and NVMe drives. My first thought was, "Really? Another price increase?" I bet you felt the same way.

I've utilized many cloud providers, including AWS, OVH, and DigitalOcean. Each time I believed that the prices for their services would remain constant, yet something always changes and the costs increase. While the news didn't shock me, it did lead me to reflect on the reasons behind the increase.

Why Will Cloud Service Pricing Increase?​

The primary reason is quite simple; as hardware becomes increasingly costly, so too will the price of cloud services. In order to function properly, a Cloud Provider will require:

• Fast RAM
• High-Speed NVMe drives
• Powerful Efficient Servers.

These items are presently all becoming increasingly expensive. Artificial Intelligence and Big Data are drastically increasing RAM and drive requirements thus generating an increasingly higher demand for both. Consequently, as demand raises price, it is logical that both would be impacted negatively.

The Effects of the AI Wave on Our Futures​

As far as I can see, 2026 will bring the following changes to the way we will interact with cloud services:

• Cost of cloud plans will rise
• There will be reduced AMPs or hard disk space in basic service plans
• We will see more service offers, such as year-long subscriptions or bundled packages
• Customers will begin to compare providers and their pricing

I think many customers have already started using smaller hosting companies, as well as combining home and cloud servers to save money. I personally attempted to host some of my work on my own server. But after running a power use calculation and determining my costs for cooling and backing up data, I decided to return to using a cloud hosting service.

So Should We Be Worried?​

Instead of worrying about it though, it is time to get smart about it.

In an increase of 5-10% is not really that big of a deal. The first step we need to take is begin to audit our environments and find ways to save. Examples include:

• Shutdown your unused servers,
• Resize your virtual machines if possible,
• Use more cost-effective regions,
• Try out other cloud providers.

Finally, Octave Klaba's statement is a warning to the cloud community that hardware costs are rising, the growth of AI has accelerated rapidly, and cloud providers won't be able to maintain pricing at this lower level indefinitely.

So yes, we will probably see cloud pricing increases in 2026, however, we can effectively manage these pricing increases through smart resource planning.