EU Cloud Provider News Roundup: Late February – May 2026 | EU Cloud Cost

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cloud-news roundup kubernetes hetzner ovhcloud scaleway stackit civo thalassa exoscale cyso aws gcp azure<br>EU Cloud Provider News Roundup: Late February – May 2026<br>Three months of EU cloud news in one place: OVHcloud, Scaleway and Hetzner all raise prices, a Linux kernel zero-day forces K8s patches everywhere, CloudStack momentum at Cyso, STACKIT keeps shipping, GKE hits 1.36, and sovereignty rhetoric goes from marketing copy to product strategy.

MR

Michael Raeck

May 20, 2026<br>18 min read

This is the second edition of our monthly EU Cloud Provider News Roundup, covering everything that happened across our tracked providers between February 17 and May 20, 2026. The previous edition ended at February 16, so nothing here repeats what we already covered.

Key Takeaways

Pricing went up across the EU, and providers had to explain themselves. Three of the biggest EU providers raised prices in a single quarter. Octave Klaba published a long-form justification of OVHcloud’s Public Cloud, Bare Metal and VPS increases. Scaleway followed with a “transparent update on pricing” post. Then Hetzner — historically the discount benchmark — announced an across-the-board hike effective April 1, with cloud servers up 30-37% and storage up to +53%, applied to existing contracts . Common stated cause: hardware costs (DRAM +171% YoY, NAND doubling, HDDs sold out for the year) and energy. The discount-cloud era in the EU just got measurably more expensive.

Sovereignty stopped being a slogan and became a product roadmap. Cyso publicly migrated off OpenStack and is moving from VMware to CloudStack, explicitly framing the move as a sovereignty play. Scaleway dedicated two posts to SecNumCloud. Civo published three posts in May tearing into hyperscaler “sovereignty washing” and the marketing of “European Cloud” labels on US-owned infrastructure. STACKIT, OVHcloud, and Exoscale kept hammering the same theme. When this many providers spend this much editorial budget on one narrative, the budget is coming from somewhere — probably from sales pipelines that now actually close on sovereignty grounds.

A Linux kernel zero-day forced everyone to patch K8s at once. Copy.Fail (CVE-2026-31431) hit Kubernetes nodes across providers in late April / early May. Thalassa, OVHcloud, and Azure all published mitigation guidance within days. If you’re running self-managed K8s on any EU IaaS, this is the kind of incident that justifies paying for managed K8s.

AI inference workloads are now the centre of gravity for K8s product development. Azure shipped a five-part AI-on-AKS series, NVIDIA Dynamo / MIG / DRA integrations, and per-app token rate limiting. AWS shipped Trainium DRA support, multi-account observability, and EKS Hybrid Nodes Gateway GA. STACKIT shipped MLflow Tracking (AI Model Experiments), Telemetry Router, and a GPT-OSS 20B model. Civo previewed NVIDIA Vera Rubin coverage and signed a UK sovereign-LLM partnership. The bulk of new managed-K8s features this quarter is AI-shaped.

Hyperscalers still ship more, faster. GKE pushed Kubernetes 1.36 to Rapid in May, GA’d Pod Snapshots and Accelerator Network Profile, and added concurrent node-pool upgrades. AKS shipped Azure Container Storage v2.1 GA with Elastic SAN. AWS Hybrid Nodes Gateway hit GA. EU providers move slower on infrastructure primitives, but they’re winning on positioning.

Hetzner

The headline this quarter: Hetzner joined OVHcloud and Scaleway with a major price hike. Plus continued API hardening and TLS modernization.

Price adjustment as of April 1, 2026 (announced Feb 23, effective Apr 1): Across-the-board increase covering Cloud, dedicated servers (EX/AX/RX/SX/GPU/BRANDS), Storage Box, Object Storage, Storage Share, web hosting, Load Balancers, SSL, and domains. Applies to both new orders and existing contracts — no grandfathering. Reported ranges: cloud servers +30-37%, object storage +30-53%, dedicated servers ~+20% (AX42 €47.30 → €57.30; DX293 €305.60 → €355.60). Entry-level CX23 went €2.99 → €3.99. Hetzner cites “dramatically” higher hardware acquisition costs — DRAM up 171% YoY, NAND flash doubling, HDD supply consumed by AI buildout. See Hetzner’s price-adjustment docs page for the per-product table. This is the third major EU price hike in three months and the largest one — Hetzner customers should re-cost any auto-scaled or commitment-free workloads.

Post-quantum key agreement on Load Balancers (Mar 9): X25519MLKEM768 hybrid for TLS 1.3. Hetzner is ahead of most EU providers on PQ-readiness.

Datacenter fields deprecated for Locations (Apr 1): datacenter.server_types / recommendation removed October 1, 2026. Replaced by server_types.locations.available / .recommended. Audit your tooling now.

Primary IP API rework (Apr 27): assignee_type optional on POST /v1/primary_ips. From August 1, unassigned IPs return unassigned instead of server. Prerequisite for attaching...