The short answer: find out this month which of your workloads are exposed, then act on the three things that have a deadline or a direct fix: move off old virtual machine series, settle your Azure reservations before 1 February 2027, and stop paying for memory you do not use. The pressure comes from several directions at once: Azure list prices change on that date, AWS has repriced its GPU reservations three times in 2026, and the memory shortage that smaller providers blame for their own increases has not eased. A 2027 budget drafted on last year’s rates will be wrong, and the invoice in February is a poor way to find out by how much.
What Changed, and When
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 15 June 2026 | Hetzner applies new prices to new orders and rescales; its CCX13 cloud server in Germany and Finland goes from EUR 15.99 to EUR 42.99 a month | Hetzner |
| July 2026 | AWS raises EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML by about 20%, after about 15% in January | InfoQ, CXOToday |
| 1 October 2026 | OVHcloud bills local storage and public IPv4 separately on Generation 3 Public Cloud instances, adding 1.4% to 21.9% for the same configuration. New dedicated server orders rose by up to 87% from 1 September, and existing servers reprice at renewal by less | OVHcloud, Techzine |
| Early October 2026 | Microsoft notifies Azure customers of the February changes through Service Health | Techzine, nOps |
| 7 October 2026 | AWS raises Capacity Blocks again: about 15% in the US and about 26.5% on P5 and P5en outside it, where an H100 reservation goes from USD 4.72 to USD 5.97 per accelerator-hour. The next update is due in January 2027 | AWS, Classmethod |
| 1 February 2027 | Azure regional and legacy increases take effect, and new reservations stop being exchangeable | Microsoft, Techzine |
What Microsoft’s Changes Cover
The regional increase applies to Dublin (17%), France Central and South (11%), Amsterdam and both Norwegian regions (9%) and Singapore (8%). It covers pay-as-you-go, Enterprise Agreement and Microsoft Customer Agreement rates. Several v7 machine families are exempt, as are v1 and v2 series, but only because those take the separate worldwide rise of about 25%. Most Azure Storage in those regions rises as well, and the published lists of exempt tiers differ, so read your own Service Health notice. The notices went to customers and we found no public Microsoft post, so these figures come from partners and trade press who quote them consistently.
The treatment of commitments needs care. Techzine reports that reserved instances keep their price to the end of the term, and that a savings plan keeps its hourly amount but buys less once the underlying rates rise. nOps says the regional notice does not state this. Get the answer for your own agreement in writing.
One change is fully documented by Microsoft. A compute or database reservation bought on or after 1 February 2027 cannot be exchanged if a savings plan covers that service; a reservation bought earlier keeps one final exchange after that date; and a renewal after that date counts as a new purchase. Trade-in to a savings plan remains available. Older series have been tightening separately: since 1 July 2026 reservations for many of them cannot be bought or renewed, new subscriptions cannot deploy them and extra quota is refused. Dv2 and Dsv2 retire on 1 May 2028, and Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3 and Esv3 on 15 November 2029. For these machines, the price rise is the last of several signals to move.
Why Prices Are Moving
Microsoft cites regional market conditions, consistent pricing across regions and investment in capacity and hardware; it does not mention memory. AWS says only that its reservation prices follow supply and demand. OVHcloud is explicit: it said in August that its RAM costs had risen sixfold in a year, that NVMe drives cost about seven times more, and that it expects the shortage to last until 2028. TrendForce projects conventional DRAM contract prices up 10% to 15% in the fourth quarter and NAND flash up 15% to 20%, a slower pace than earlier in the year, with enterprise SSDs the one category accelerating. It also expects memory to take 47% of large cloud providers’ capital spending this year and 68% in 2027.
The rise is uneven. As of 2 November 2026 we found no announcement of a general increase in standard compute prices from AWS or Google Cloud, and the AWS rises we found are confined to its GPU reservations. That is an observation, not a promise, and the direction of cost is plain. It also arrives when the easy savings are thinner: the FinOps Foundation’s State of FinOps 2026 survey, of 1,192 practitioners managing more than USD 83 billion of annual cloud spend, reports diminishing returns from traditional optimization.
Who Is Exposed
- Companies hosting in Dublin, Amsterdam, France, Norway or Singapore. As an illustration, USD 10,000 a month of affected machines and storage in Dublin becomes USD 11,700, or USD 20,400 more a year. A business serving Pakistan or the Gulf from Singapore or Europe is in scope.
- Companies on Azure’s UAE and Qatar regions. Neither is on the regional list, though the legacy rise applies worldwide. Microsoft said Saudi Arabia East would open this month; we found no launch confirmation as of 2 November.
- Anyone on old machine series, in any region, including those whose reservations are expiring and cannot be renewed.
- Teams reserving GPUs on AWS. A Capacity Block is charged at the rate in force on the day it is bought, so the purchase date now matters.
- Customers of smaller providers. At OVHcloud, existing dedicated servers reprice at renewal; at Hetzner, a cloud rescale takes the new price.
Six Steps Before 1 February
- Break the bill down. Export spend by region, machine series and storage tier. AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Oracle and Huawei Cloud all publish billing data in the FinOps FOCUS format, so several clouds can be compared on one sheet.
- Move v1 and v2 machines first. It is the one increase you can avoid outright, and the retirement dates require the work anyway. In the seven regions, an exempt v7 family also avoids the regional rise. Confirm that the target size is available, and test before cutting over.
- Settle your reservations. Use your exchanges while they are unrestricted, check which auto-renewals fall after 1 February, and choose reservations for stable workloads and savings plans for those likely to change.
- Pay for less memory. Memory-heavy instances and oversized databases sit closest to the cost pressure. Size them against measured usage, and tune the queries that made them large.
- Price a region move where the rules allow it. Weigh the saving against latency, transfer cost and the law; our article on data residency in Saudi Arabia and the UAE sets out what must stay in-country.
- Budget a scenario, not a single number. Model 2027 with these increases, with a further rise on memory-heavy services, and with your savings applied. Time firm GPU purchases around the January update.
Where SoftwareBiz fits. Our FinOps and cost optimization service assigns every cost to a team or product, sizes resources against measured usage, plans commitments against reliable forecasts and sets alerts before the invoice arrives, so finance can budget 2027 on figures it trusts. Where the bill points to the design itself, our architecture and performance audit finds the slow queries and oversized components behind it and ranks each fix by effort and benefit. When old machine series have to go, our cloud migration and modernization team moves them in planned waves with tested rollback.
What to Do This Month
Open your Azure Service Health notices, run the export in step one and ask your Microsoft account team or reseller how your agreement treats the February rates. The reservation decisions have a fixed date, and an old series moved in December is a rise you never pay.