AI didn’t just eat our jobs - it ate our memory. Your cloud bill isn’t climbing because your app got popular. It’s climbing because GPUs are guzzling the same chips your VPS needs.
Just got the love letter from my host: storage and local block storage jump by over 20 percent starting May. Not unique - it’s a wave. Cheap VPS is on life support.
My AI research agent pulled the raw stuff - factory output, spot charts, supplier notes - and the story is simple. Memory chips and flash drives fell off a cliff in 2023, then roared back. Prices from the bottom have nearly doubled. Why? AI rigs use HBM - think stacks of ultra-fast memory glued to GPUs - and those stacks hog the same factories and materials as normal RAM and SSDs. Big AI buyers prepay, suppliers prioritize them, and the crumbs get sold to the rest of us at a premium.
Hosting is a thin-margin business. When the parts spike, they pass it on. Hyperscalers can hedge with huge contracts. Indie providers and SMBs can’t - they ride the tide. And right now t