Partly right, but the causation is more indirect than that. Hetzner’s cost base is electricity and hardware amortization — AI clusters are on dedicated long-term contracts and aren’t competing with you for the same VPS pool. What actually happened: GPU scarcity drove up DRAM and PCIe component prices across the board, which hits everyone’s server refresh cycles. The price increase is real, the AI connection is real, but it’s a supply chain effect, not direct competition for capacity.

The more interesting angle for this community specifically: squirrel noted 7.9% of Fediverse servers run on Hetzner. Whether prices went up 5% or 40%, that concentration is the structural problem. The fediverse is supposed to be decentralized infrastructure. It isn’t, really, if most of it runs on one provider’s backbone.