Hetzner Doubled Its Prices Again. The AI Memory Crunch Is Why

Hetzner just raised its prices again. New orders in the US increased by 158 percent. Germany saw a 99 percent jump. Some items even tripled in cost.

This is a shock for a provider known for being cheap. But you should not focus only on the number. You should focus on the reason. This reason will affect your bills too, even if you do not use Hetzner or AI.

The AI boom is eating all the hardware.

AI data centers now use 70 percent of high-end DRAM. Companies like Samsung and Micron are moving all their capacity to AI memory. This leaves very little for standard servers. DRAM prices rose 171 percent this year. Hard drives are also sold out for the year.

Hetzner sells close to cost. They do not have big margins to hide these costs. Large providers like AWS or Google Cloud might hide these spikes behind long contracts. They will not avoid them. The cost will show up later in higher renewal terms or smaller discounts.

Hetzner is still cheaper than the big clouds. However, the price gap is shrinking.

How you should react:

  • Protect your current machines. Existing servers keep old prices. Do not resize or reorder them unless you must. A small change will trigger the new, higher price for the whole machine.

  • Audit your memory. RAM is now your biggest cost. Stop over-provisioning. Check your instances and remove any spare gigabytes you do not use.

  • Use ARM processors. The ARM price increase was much lower than x86. If your software works on ARM, switch to it to save money.

  • Update your budgets. Hardware inflation is here to stay. Plan your costs for 2027 assuming memory and storage stay expensive.

  • Do not panic migrate. Moving to a new provider costs time and engineering effort. Measure and right-size your current setup before you try to flee.

The AI build-out is now driving the price of every computing workload. You do not need to train AI models to pay for the AI boom. If you need memory, you are competing with AI giants for the same supply.

Source: https://dev.to/devopsdaily/hetzner-doubled-its-prices-again-the-ai-memory-crunch-is-why-64b

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