The real story here isn't Hetzner being greedy. It's that AI companies are vacuuming up every DRAM chip on the planet and the rest of us get to pay the tax. I priced out a RAM upgrade for my home server last week. Same kit I bought 8 months ago for 90 EUR is now 400+. That's not normal market dynamics.
What worries me more is the second-order effects. Startups that would normally spin up cheap VPS instances to prototype and iterate now face meaningfully higher costs at the exact stage where every euro matters. The "just deploy it" culture that made European indie dev scene so productive was built on sub-10 EUR/month boxes. Those days might be over for a while.
The 1 GB RAM replaces one Forgejo runner that was in Hetzner. With €5 per month, I will earn this investment back in less than two years. After the price increase, this period will only shorten!
I also wrote about this at https://huijzer.xyz/posts/148/raspberry-pi-as-forgejo-runner
(I also prefer comments that are clear without insinuations).
Clarity > Cleverness2. Trump is making everyone scared to use US hosting.
So they're leveraging for extra profits.
We are tied to American economy and if AI companies start driving prices up not only DRAM but basically everything will become more expensive.
E.g., if I’m running a business in the US and I don’t kiss Trump’s ring (and pay bribes), if he becomes dictator for life in 2028, all bets are off for my business.
The most stable places to do business in 2026 are probably the EU and China.
"Hard drives already sold out for this year" - https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/20/ai_blamed_again_as_ha...
Time for an AI tax on the hyperscalers.
What happens when an unstoppable force (building everything in Electron because hardware is cheap) meets an immovable object (oh no hardware is expensive now)?
A human doesn’t need 100TB of books to learn the alphabet.
A human does need 16ish hours per day of audio/video content for several years to learn the alphabet.
So, getting systems with higher RAM capacity is getting harder (from laptops to smartphones). So, for a couple of years, we need to stop using Electron so much and use what we have efficiently.
Data centers, esp. AI hyperscalers do not care about efficiency for now, because they can suffocate consumer-grade part of the hardware marketplace and get anything and everything they want. When their bubble pops, or the whole capacity ends, they need to learn to be efficient, too.
For reference, a well-optimized cluster runs at ~90% efficiency even though they have thousands of users. AI hyperscalers are not there. Maybe 60% efficient, at most. They waste a lot of resources to keep their momentum.
https://users.rust-lang.org/t/energy-consumption-in-programm...
Also, Typescript 5 times worse than Javascript? That doesn't really make sense, since they share the same runtime.
See this example as one demonstration: https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?q=8#example/enums
The TS code looks very different from the JS code (which obviously is the point), but given that, not hard to imagine they have different runtime characteristics, especially for people who don't understand the inside and outs of JavaScript itself, and have only learned TypeScript.
The resource consumption b/w rust and golang would be pretty minimal to figure out actually for most use cases imho.
1) There are no barriers to entry for competitors (e.g. protectionist tariffs, equal access to capital for everyone)
2) There are perfect substitutes available, so transitioning to a competitor is seamless and free (e.g. no requirement to store data in Country X, no vendor lock-in, no security compliance)
3) The industry is not a "natural monopoly" when only a handful of vendors can operate due to capital investment and national/global distribution required (see power utilities, telecoms, petrochemicals)
4) Profitability attracts competitors (won't happen because of #3), but heavy competition prevents abnormal profits from accumulating to a single player (happens because of #1, #2 and #3)
When markets don't figure things out, as is the case around the world, you get a tangled mess of market failures, government intervention and lobbying to neuter proposed interventions.
My argument is not that market is perfect but that the alternatives are probably far worse, like a new tax on a specific group of companies.
By the time market figures things out, you may no longer have services, and hardware that you use daily. When such amounts of stupid money are pumped into a single industry, even if all AI companies went out of business tomorrow, it's going to take years for things to go back to normal.
FWIW, I'm not advocating taxes, as I think that won't really do anything. I don't know what the solution is either.
That's my hypothesis I spent a whole of 30 seconds thinking about anyways.
What does this even mean? I know people on the internet sometimes exaggerate, but I cannot even begin to find a more charitable meaning with this, what exactly will be "destroyed" in "tech" because of prices going up for a year or two?
Then take a look at your bank statement to see what are the services you pay for monthly that also require the same hardware.
Now, imagine that these devices or services can no longer procure RAM, SSD or HDD. There's no more available supply for these components, because this is what's happening.
Would you still be able to have these devices if they all broke tomorrow? What about your hypothetical Backblaze subscription? Would you still be able to have an off-site backup?
Why would I imagine something so far out from what will realistically happen?
Again, a lot of doom and gloom over very unrealistic scenarios. Where are you even getting this from, YouTube channels?
Of course if there is no RAM or flash-storage at all available, eventually hardware will be unfeasible. But when we've experienced these sort of things before, it eventually restores to "normal" prices, and there absolutely nothing pointing to what we're experiencing now to get even worse, if anything it's already stabilized.
Same with work -- I've just ordered some replacements for 13 year old servers in one office, but if it was more economical to repair them
The solution might have to be mandatory rationing of some kind to avoid a situation where only a handful of AI giants are able to buy essential components. We can't just throw the rest of the economy under a bus to support the AI bubble for a few more months.
I'm working with a business right now that would like to buy some new servers for sensible, boring business reasons. It is having trouble because the prices from their normal suppliers are now extremely high - if the components are even available at all. This business has nothing to do with AI or Big Tech and yet it's at risk of being unable to continue normal operations in much the same way that a business would be affected if the phone networks were all switched off or the water supply to its office was cut. We regulate those industries because their continued reasonable operation is essential to make sure everyone else can continue to operate reasonably as well.
I'm looking at the procurement sheet that I made for them a year ago. Half of the items are no longer available, while the other half became so expensive that we'd probably build 10 of such labs with these costs a year ago.
I'm also looking at my home NAS right now - I pray not even a plastic clip breaks inside, because I'd have to shut it down.
While these are still likely the first things that you'd think of being affected, I'm sure the effects are rippling through essentially every industry that utilizes these components in their supply chain. Which is probably - every industry nowadays?
We live in a world with markets dominated by cartels of tech companies who don't play by the rules. Every other industry that impacts society in a negative way typically pays some sort of specialized tax to offset that, I don't know why these tech oligarchs shouldn't have too. It's wild how people just want to let them do whatever they want.
Everyone says we need to deregulate tech, and certain industries to get ahead of China.. Isn't it funny how their largely government controlled economy (to a degree) is annihilating the west on all fronts economically. We need far more regulation.
China will defeat the West solely because it regulates its billionaires, not the other way around like we have it in the West. And I hope so, the world is rooting for you China.
I don’t know who will come out winners but I do agree that China did well taking the playbook from Singapore and navigating their country through incredible amounts of growth. They are still facing depressing housing prices and deflation in other parts of the economy.
There are absolutely areas where markets breakdown, thinking problems where impacts are on longer horizons but for simple supply and demand like what we are seeing today, things will sort out in a couple years.
The ones I'm affected by seemingly:
Product -> previous price -> New price as of 1 April 2026
EX42-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.65 -> € 51.13
AX41 (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.22
AX41-NVMe (FSN1) -> € 49.73 -> € 51.18
Server Auction -> € 65.22 -> € 67.18
Here is the full list of the updated prices: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...
Seems it's because of increased cost of hardware, and they seemingly tried to avoid increasing the prices but they couldn't. From the email:
> The underlying causes of the increased costs are, among others, the exploding demand for AI-related computing power and for cloud services. In addition, raw material prices and production costs have also generally risen for manufacturers. The costs for RAM and SSDs especially have risen by a large amount. For example, the cost for DRAM memory has increased up to 500% since September 2025. And according to market researchers like TrendForce, this price trend will continue throughout the year.
> We have genuinely tried hard to optimize our costs and to prevent increasing our prices for as long as possible. But we can no longer compensate for the strain that it has placed on our operations. We want to continue to deliver quality products that meet both our standards and your expectations, so we must take this step.
* Cloud (VMs): 38%
* Bare metal: 15%
* Memory add-on for bare metal: 575% (effective immediately)
It feels like memory add-on is intentionally set high to discourage customers from adding more memory.
AX102 (128 GB RAM) costs €124, AX162 (256 GB RAM) costs €244, but the 128 GB memory add-on alone costs €264. If we ignore the setup fee, it’s more cost-effective to provision additional servers instead of adding RAM to bare metal instances.
Here's the link to cloud and bare metal pricing changes: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...
> It feels like memory add-on is intentionally set very high to discourage customers from adding more memory.
Memory prices are so stupid now that 575% is pretty close to their actual costs.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
DDR5-6000 2x32GB: ~$200 -> ~$1000
By the same time next year the prices likely gone down, although maybe not to the pre-increase, but surely much lower than currently. Putting it in my calendar to revisit this comment in a year :)
Grocery prices have also stabilized but I’m still paying too much ha
The fact that it stabilized (at whatever price) and that suppliers aren't even thinking about ramping up production, should tell people that the doomers and gloomers were yet again over-reacting to things they don't fully understand themselves.
> Grocery prices have also stabilized but I’m still paying too much
I think that's a local problem, if you happen to live in a country that's trying to move over to isolationism rather than globalism as of late. In other modern countries the prices are also increasing, but at least following inflation somewhat so the increase doesn't seem as bad for us. Maybe at least yet? Who knows.
Ramping up production takes months and paying back the price to ramp up production takes years. Manufacturers have started investing in more production capacity but it'll take a while before supply can be sold off.
Based on interviews with industry professionals, I believe the forecast is that RAM prices will start going down again between August and the end of next year. Until then, prices will climb as stock depletes and RAM production is capped.
Where are you getting this from? Because that's not what I've seen, if anything the industry seems to lowering the production capacity, not increasing it.
And even if it takes years, if they thought it was a sustainable growth in demand, they'd at least be moving in that direction which again, doesn't seem to be happening.
> I believe the forecast is that RAM prices will start going down again between August and the end of next year. Until then, prices will climb as stock depletes and RAM production is capped.
You're already wrong with this today, prices stopped climbing already and have been stabilizing at the current prices... https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
I don’t see this anywhere, source?
From the Robot UI, I tried ordering a new EX44 or EX63:
- EX63 comes with 64 GB DDR5 by default, can be upgraded to 192 GB DDR5 ECC for added €42.35
- EX44 comes with 64 GB by default, can be upgraded to 128 GB DDR4 Non-ECC for added € 16.94 max. per month
Checking today doesn't really indicate anything.
It's worth noting that the hardware price of RAM is up at least 550% yoy, so this was always going to happen as soon as their existing contracts had to be renewed
I thought the "effective immediately" mean that April 1st threshold wasn't for the memory...
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax162-r/configu...
Before today, we used to be able to order an AX162-R for €207 and add 128 GB of RAM for €46. Starting today, the same calculator provides €207 for an AX162-R (*) and €264 for the 128 GB RAM add-on. Sadly, HN doesn't let me upload screenshots.
(*) The price change for AX162-R machines is effective starting April 1st.
The worst counter example of this was Mercedes sending me an email saying "the terms and conditions have been updated, please read them at this link". It linked to the 52 page document I was supposed to read through in its entirety and manually diff against previous! Good thing they started adding a change log in the emails after some customer push back.
In EU there are: Hetzner, OVH and Seeweb.
Vultr may be a good alternative. If you want to search VPS prices across the 6 major clouds (gcloud, aws-cli, hcloud, az, doctl, and vultr-cli) I made a wrapper TUI that lets you search, sort, and rent VPS.
See it here: https://tui.bluedot.ink
I feel like a huge selling point of Hetzner is that they're based in Europe, and they're themselves citing that as the reason for a huge uptick in sales and new users. In that context, I don't Vultr is a realistic alternative.
What's behind the European push?
Obviously the US pushing absolutely everyone away and making EU and Europe the new enemy, so now we here want to reciprocate that and feel the need to move away from US infrastructure ASAP.
Personally I've been on a personal quest to minimize my usage of US-based services for many years already, but right now it's even part of the mainstream conversations, so seems to be ramping up, finally.
If a provider has higher margins, they may choose to eat some of the cost. But I would not expect that to be the case across the board
Announcement page: http://docs.hetzner.com/de/general/infrastructure-and-availa...
Pricing page: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/
https://www.reddit.com/r/OVHcloud/comments/1ra5jzg/ovh_doubl...
This has affected SSDs first, then RAM, then HDD and it doesn't look like even HDD manufacturers are going to increase production. So unless groups of people suddenly learn how to manufacture all of this hardware and open factories quickly, it's going to be a very fun next few years.
People have been predicting SaaS will die for all the wrong reasons. It's not that anyone can ship a SaaS clone by prompting an AI, it's that nobody is going to have access to the hardware required.
No, that's not true, they've done increases before, at least for VPSes only, I think that was 1 or 2 years ago or so?
> Unfortunately, we are forced to increase the prices on these Server Auction models [...] old price 37.60 Euro -> 59.29 Euro, comes into effect 2022-03-03
Citing raising energy prices at that time.
At least where I live there’s a stupid amount of red tape for these things.
If you just want to pilot a 747, drive your car really fast at a skate ramp.
If their growth had been in their projections in say 2024, they might have just been able to skip a round of hardware purchases, but the combination of growth meaning they must expand their hardware and hardware costs made this inevitable.
The massive DC overbuild does not match demand, prices tank in 3-5 years.
Third possibility: some approach like Taalas renders the current storyline meaningless. Would put 3 in 10 odds of this happening but I'd looove to see it.
Fourth: entire planet gets profoundly sick of emdashes, we all move back into caves and live in eternal gratitude of the moment humanity woke up to how little all of this really matters.
But, the shortages may very well continue into 2027, leading to some manufacturers going out of business and yet another massive redistribution of wealth.
Try this as experiment - try to buy something like precision dowel pins from Poland or DOLD Mechatronik with shipping to Greece, Bulgaria or Romania vs the same thing from Aliexpress or Temu. Chinese costs are cheaper even if they have to fly here.
Pick 2.
Not to mention that from July 1, 2026, the EU is abolishing the €150 duty-free threshold for non-EU shipments. This is specifically targeted at the flood of packages from marketplaces like Temu and Shein.
From July there will be a flat customs duty of €3 for small consignments. This fee applies per category. If your package contains items from different product groups (e.g., a shirt and a cable), you might pay the fee multiple times.
The Goal: To create fair competition for European retailers who can't compete with subsidized shipping and tax loopholes from massive non-EU sellers.
This will obviously have a knock-on effect for larger shipped items which are presumably subsidised at the bottom line by these parcels of fast-fashion and eWaste.
This is an awful experiment. Only consumers care about delivery costs on deliveries like these, and what you're looking at are explicitly not goods aimed at consumers.
Anyway - you seems to misunderstand. If transporting something from Shenzhen to Franfurt is cheaper than transporting the same thing from Krakow to Thessaloniki - means that EU has fucked up royally in its main mission - to facilitate movement of goods. WE have ungodly patch of local carriers and courier companies and a lot of friction in every kind of intra eu goods movement.
Is it even physically possible to deliver at a significantly lower cost? Pizza ovens are both very large and very heavy, you can't fit many of them in a vehicle. They're also tricky to load and unload.
Ummmm. No.
It means the United Nations Universal Post Union international treaties which effectively provide China with subsidised postage TO THE WORLD (as China is a "developing country") needs urgently updating....... Some of the postage you pay to send parcels within the boarders of your own country is used to subsidise crap posted from China.