I wonder how much leverage the hyperscalers like AWS/GCP/Azure have on their own supply chain to keep costs level in their clouds.
I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.
> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.
For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.
It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.
But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.
I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust)
You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production.
We do need more capacity tokeep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes.
But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success.
If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous.
If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating.
(Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.
And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.
If you buy a dedicated server at Hetzner, you actually need immediate hardware.
Many VPS providers also just resell Hetzner, OVH or other dedicated servers so they won’t increase the price until their own provider does.
Hetzner has a "cloud" offering. The price increases aren't small either.
They shifted right (VPS-1 2026 is now VPS-2 2027) and increased prices.
Crazy stuff
So far, haven't seen any other notable cloud price increases. Thought for sure they'd be reevaluating by now, I'm surprised to see the stability.
The increase was 25% and was, of course, mainly due to hard drive prices.
The peering announcement or did I miss something?
I doubt this has to do with the hardware discussion. This is just them increasing their lock-in and trying to curb businesses running to other CDNs (whole point of the peering).
Has anyone here used Vultr much? I'm curious how they felt about bang for buck. At least with Hatchbox it's easy to run multiple domains on one box.
One of the reasons why I loved Hetzner so much is that you could always get the latest generation, but unless I have missed it - it seems like their hardware hasn't been refreshed in awhile.
Old prices: https://web.archive.org/web/20260513201413/https://docs.hetz...
Another possibility: They were growing too fast and need to slow down. At some point additional growth might become too risky, or even exponentially more expensive. It might require fundamental organizational changes.
They look at the numbers and see the risk of making less profit than before, if they expand. Especially if demand decreases at some point, instead of growing further. So they decide to just raise the prices, lower demand and make even more money without additional risk.
Hetzner and OVH and other bare metal but low cost providers use commodity hardware. When that commodity hardware increases there is simply no other option. The secret to the success of these providers is using common off-the-shelf hardware instead of specialized server hardware, which is now being cannibalized.
It seems they have shifted by reducing the setup fees, and increasing the monthly costs. As this generates more revenue. And its easy to prove this...
AX42 ... Its 8700GE that has gone from 65 Euro to 225 Euro. With the setup fee now being 112 Euro instead of 225 Euro. It has 64GB memory, and 1TB storage. The storage even in todays market is 100 Euro. The memory is 644 Euro.
Do the math ... Hetzner servers had a hardware payback periode of between 9 to 11 month if you took the market value. This calculation has always been very stable over the 20 years i used Hetzner.
This new price, reduced the hardware payback periode to ~4 month. It seems to be that Hetzer is trying to use the memory price issues, as a excuse. The revenue of those same servers now increased to a insane level. More revenue with less hardware.
The real issue is that a lot of companies are moving from US hosting to EU hosting because of the problems with the US. Hetzner sees this as the perfect time to cash in on Enterprise customers.
They have been trying to replace the "cheap" normal consumers with enterprise. This trend has been going on for a while already.
Every customer that now leaves, is a server they can rent out to business customers.
If you want to see the same thing, look up what happened to Microsoft/Github Copilot where they turn around has been sudden and very strong, with a clear goal of moving everything to enterprise.
Monthly costs have gone up as well. Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany, construction has exploded far beyond inflation and, most importantly, electricity prices are still ridiculous due to merit-order and the refusal of splitting up Germany into multiple power pricing regions.
Guess what? I am paying as a consumer about the same price as before 2022. Did Hetzner change their price down? Remember, the industrial price also dropped (and they also build out a large solar plant). No ...
Ok, inflation? But those price increases already covered part of that... Just saying, its not been the first price increase that happened. There have been multiple ones that Hetzner did over the years. Some flew under people radars.
> Payroll has seen significant increases in Germany,
Yea, we have seen nothing of that increase... O, wait, they reduce our income because the social security increase their costs. Yay ..
There is an engineered scarcity, billion dollar companies can't ramp up production?
Murica is stuck depending on the good will of Korea and China for thinking rocks? le fucking mao
you're a semiconductor manufacturer who wants to take advantage of the current boom. your options are:
A) invest a hundred cubic meters of money into doubling your manufacturing capacity
B) raise prices by 100%
I can't really blame them for going with B. the blame lies entirely with America's ability to invest billions of its infinite money into companies that make no profit now and have no plausible path to profitability in the future.
So for every ~4GB of memory that you can produce in normal DDR5, you can only make 1GB of HBM. But you make multiple times the revenue.
The demand for HBM memory is not going to go away. LLMs are memory bandwidth hungry, and we are going to see production going to AI. But also to "lower end" like B200's.
That means, they are producing multiple times less memory (if we look for the normal market demand), but still need to produce more for the memory bandwidth hungry market.
We are seeing more products entering the "prosumer/business" market that are also memory bandwidth hungry. This demand will not go away. It will actually increase as companies move to more localized workloads. There is is a issue with data privacy that a lot of companies legally deal with.
The lacking ramp up is not a sign of them being scared of over production, its a realization that 3 companies hold the market in a strangle hold, and "slow" scale. If everybody plays friendly, they can milk this for years.
China is a solution but China does not have the HBM production levels, and will take years to scale and put a dent in the market. And China is ... allocating a lot to domestic production of AI > HBM ...
The reality is, that unless competition ( as in China ) does not start scaling beyond the expected levels, the big 3 have no reason to scale too fast.
And money is not the issue ... have you seen their revenue (and net profit!! ) numbers. A few billions is peanuts for them at this point. They simply do not want to scale too fast because that means less milking ... Memory demand is not going to away. When people talk about the AI bubble popping, its more in terms of the stock market. The product is here and not going away.
The person you're replying to explained why they're not ramping up, and you replied "They are not ramping up", which seems awfully silly.
(However, Hetzner did an earlier price increase 38 days ago. HN's submission logic sends posting the url to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306066)
Hetzner just achieved their pricing by using commodity consumer hardware.
This is now making them the canary, as they don't have the multi year business contacts the others have - so they're uniquely vulnerable to the current consumer hardware price increase.
But the rest will follow, unless the bubble burst, which is unlikely to happen before the others increase their costs, too
https://www.hetzner.com/sb/#ram_from=256
Yeah mostly old CPUs, but considering RAM shortages gonna be much cheaper than colocation.
PS: link contains 256GB RAM filter since I guess OP need RAM.
Although I did plan for OVH-level dedicated server prices, so as long as they don't jack up prices too I'll be fine...
Advertised prices for my setup are now roughly 2x what I'm currently paying.