Is Sovereignty Becoming Unaffordable Now?

Hetzner will increase prices for its entire portfolio starting April 1, 2026. In the cloud sector, many rates will rise by 30 to 35 percent.

The CX11 in Germany: from €3.92 to €5.34 per month.
The CAX11: also from €3.92 to €5.34.
The CCX63: from €342.71 to €445.64.
Load Balancer 11: from €6.41 to €8.91.
Volumes: from €0.0524 to €0.0681 per hour.
Snapshots: from €0.0131 to €0.0170 per hour.

Even Dedicated Servers are seeing increases. The AX42-U rises from €56.29 to €68.19 – an increase of 21 percent. Large storage servers like the SX295 climb from €472.79 to €550.14. Even the server marketplace will be generally 3 percent more expensive.

The industry points to rising energy prices, more expensive hardware, bottlenecks in CPUs and memory, as well as massively growing demand from AI workloads. This is the economic reality of 2026.

And immediately the question arises: Is European sovereignty becoming unaffordable now?

No. It is becoming visibly priced.

For years, Hetzner was one of the cheapest providers in the market. €3.92 for a VM with dedicated resources, a German data center, redundant connectivity, and 24/7 operation was not the norm. It was an aggressively calculated price in a market structurally distorted by US hyperscalers.

Because AWS, Microsoft, and Google do not calculate Cloud in isolation.

Amazon subsidizes through retail margins.
Microsoft through enterprise agreements, Windows, M365.
Google through advertising revenue.

Cloud there is a strategic lock-in tool. Prices are part of a platform logic, not an expression of pure infrastructure costs.

There is also the legal dimension. US providers are subject to the CLOUD Act. Extraterritorial access possibilities are not a conspiracy theory, but legal reality. Operating European data with US corporations means operating in a tension field of GDPR, transatlantic agreements, and political uncertainty.

This does not disappear in any TCO table. Yet it is real.

Let’s calculate soberly:
€5.34 per month equals €64.08 per year. For a production-ready VM in a professionally operated data center.

Anyone attempting to build this infrastructure themselves needs:

– Hardware acquisition
– Redundant power supply
– Cooling
– Network connectivity
– DDoS protection
– Monitoring
– Spare parts
– Personnel
– Physical security
– Fire protection
– 24/7 readiness

Even without personnel costs, you are looking at several thousand euros in initial investment plus ongoing costs for electricity, housing, and maintenance. Economically, this scales only with very large volumes. For startups, SMEs, SaaS providers, this is not an alternative. It was not an alternative at €3.92. And it is not at €5.34.

Despite the increase, Hetzner remains priced below many European competitors – and significantly below comparable setups with hyperscalers, once data traffic, additional services, and support are realistically priced in.

The real debate is therefore not a price debate. It is an expectations debate.

We have become accustomed to European providers having to be permanently cheaper than US platforms that cross-finance their cloud and strategically use market power. This is a structural imbalance. Not an inherent efficiency superiority.

Sovereignty means: Infrastructure is financed through infrastructure. Without advertising models. Without operating system monopolies. Without global data ecosystems that make every service dependent.

This is economically tougher. But more honest.

And there are side effects that cannot be measured in euros per month:

GDPR without legal contortions.
No implicit submission to US access rights.
Less political blackmailability.
Less dependency on individual global platforms.

When the next major AWS or Azure outage sets the feed on fire, one remembers what concentration means.

Anyone who immediately jumps back into the arms of hyperscalers at a 30 percent price adjustment never understood sovereignty as a strategic goal. Then it was only a bonus as long as it was cheaper.

The honest question is not whether sovereignty is becoming unaffordable.

But whether we are willing to bear its real price – instead of continuing to benefit from cross-subsidized lock-in structures while politically complaining about them.

Digital independence costs.
Dependency costs more later.

Is Sovereignty Becoming Unaffordable Now?