DigitalOcean jacks up GPU prices 20% — and you'll feel it

DigitalOcean just raised GPU instance prices by 20%, effective this week. The increase hits their A100 and H100 SKUs — the same chips every AI startup is fighting over. They're not the only one: Hetzner, OVH, and a handful of others have all lifted GPU rates over the past year. Supply for the good silicon is tight, and the big cloud providers have been pricing it like it's a luxury good ever since the LLM boom.

For a small shop running inference on a single A100, that's a real hit on the P&L. DigitalOcean's original pitch was cheap, predictable infrastructure for people who don't want to read a pricing spreadsheet — and this move breaks that promise. If you're training or serving models on DO, you'll want to check the new rates and compare against alternatives before committing to a long lease. The market is still hot; prices may move again.

Why this matters for us: when the infra layer gets more expensive, the people running lean operations — the side hustle, the indie app, the small team — are the ones who feel it first.