Pull your storage line on Q1 vs Q4 2025. Same workload, same retention policy, same access pattern. Look at the per-terabyte rate. It moved.
That's the part most data teams haven't fully clocked yet. The era of perpetually declining cloud storage pricing, a fifteen-year trend that finance teams treated as a natural law, quietly ended in 2025. In 2026 the direction reversed across the providers that built their pitch on cost.
Worth running your own numbers against a different cost basis before the next procurement cycle locks in. You can test Akave against your live workload in under ten minutes, S3-compatible credentials, no migration, no commitment.
What actually moved with infrastructure supply data?
Three named price moves are now on the record for 2026, with a fourth in supporting infrastructure pricing that explains why.
Wasabi raised its Pay-as-You-Go rate to $7.99 USD/TB/month effective July 1, 2026, across all regions (North America, EMEA, APAC). Wasabi announced the change on May 11, 2026 and stated explicitly that the adjustment “reflect[s] broader shifts in the global infrastructure landscape, including increased costs for storage hardware, energy, and data center operations driven by growing demand and supply constraints.” Reserved Capacity Storage pricing rebases to the same $7.99 floor for new and renewing contracts on or after July 1. Existing RCS contracts continue at their prior rate through the original term, but overages on those contracts get billed at the new price.
Backblaze raised B2 pay-as-you-go pricing to $6.95/TB-month effective May 1, 2026, and removed API transaction fees as part of the same change. Backblaze announced the change in mid-March 2026; the May 4 Q1 earnings release confirmed it and framed the move as supporting “continued investment in performance.” The B2 segment grew 24% year-over-year in Q1 2026 to $22.4M, with AI customers growing 76% year-over-year and accounting for more than a third of new bookings. Backblaze's go-to-market focus has shifted toward disk-based cloud storage for neocloud AI providers, the segment where capacity competition is most acute.
EverPure (formerly Pure Storage) CEO Charles Giancarlo disclosed in an open letter dated April 23, 2026 that customer prices have risen approximately 70% since the beginning of the year, on input costs for high-volume semiconductor components that have surged between 300% and 900%, four to ten times, since mid-2025. The letter is published on purestorage.com under the company newsroom.
The infrastructure supply data underneath those moves is harder to ignore than any individual rate change.
Why this is happening?
Storage hardware costs have moved faster than headline storage rates have, and the gap is closing.
TrendForce data has enterprise SSD contract pricing rising roughly 25% quarter-over-quarter in Q4 2025, then accelerating to 53–58% QoQ in Q1 2026 (per their April 2026 update; the February 2026 forecast pegged it at 55–60%). Q2 2026 projections push further: conventional DRAM contract prices up 58–63% QoQ, and NAND contract prices up 70–75% QoQ. Lead times for large enterprise SSD orders have stretched well past what procurement cycles assumed a year ago. Western Digital is reported to have sold out hard drive capacity for all of 2026.
The driver is structural rather than cyclical. AI-driven High Bandwidth Memory demand has reallocated wafer capacity across the broader memory and storage supply chain in a way that holds component prices elevated through 2027, with relief unlikely before 2028 or 2029.
The downstream effect on cloud storage providers is mechanical. Storage vendors who built market position on “S3 at a fraction of the price” cross-subsidized their cold-tier rates with margins they harvested from elastic hot-tier capacity. The hot-tier capacity is now competing for the same datacenter footprint, power allocation, and component supply that AI clusters consume. When the AI bid rises, the cold-storage margin compresses, and the rate card moves.
This isn't a cyclical correction
Cloud storage pricing fell every year from 2010 through 2024 because compute and storage capacity grew faster than enterprise demand could absorb. That assumption broke when generative AI training workloads started consuming compute and storage at a fundamentally different scale.
Capacity additions still happen. They just don't outrun demand any more.
The 12-month direction: storage rates from cost-leader providers continue to drift upward as long as AI capacity demand exceeds operator buildout pace. The hyperscalers will hold list-price discipline on standard tiers and recoup margin through commitment terms, retrieval pricing, and minimum-storage-duration enforcement. The mid-tier providers, Wasabi, Backblaze, and the all-flash array vendors, will continue to revise rates as their capacity acquisition costs reset.
The Backblaze data is the most telling indicator. A cost-leader storage provider whose Q1 2026 revenue beat guidance is simultaneously raising rates and removing API fees, with more than a third of new bookings coming from AI customers and 76% year-over-year growth in the AI cohort. The reason the rates moved isn't that demand is weak. The reason is that the input costs moved faster than the prior rate card could absorb.
What budget owners should re-baseline this quarter?
Three things to revisit in any 2026–2027 cloud TCO model:
- The annual price-decline curve. If the model has cold-tier storage decreasing 8–12% per year, the historical default that procurement decks used through 2024, that assumption is now wrong for cost-leader providers. Model flat-to-rising rates for the next 24 months.
- Egress projections at scale. If the workload is AI training or analytics over object storage, egress projections that looked manageable at 5TB/month in 2023 become dominant line items at 50TB/month and existential at 500TB/month. The rate-card increases compound the egress story rather than offset it.
- Vendor concentration risk. If “cheap storage” was sourced from one cost-leader vendor specifically because of their rate card, the rate card is the same thing that's now moving. The risk profile of single-vendor concentration is materially different in a rising-rate environment.
Where Akave's pricing sits in this?
Akave's pricing model runs on a different set of cost inputs than the Tier 1 datacenter capacity competition that's moving rates at Wasabi, Backblaze, and the all-flash vendors. The storage layer is built on independent storage operators with their own capacity footprints. Egress is not a separate line item. Minimum-storage-duration is not embedded in the rate. API operation pricing is predictable and not exposed to the Tier 1 elastic-capacity bidding.
The honest stress-test: storage pricing on any platform is still subject to operator economics. Power costs, hardware refresh cycles, and bandwidth carry costs are not free anywhere. The claim isn't that Akave is immune to general market pressure. It's that Akave's pricing inputs are different inputs than the ones moving at the cost-leader providers right now.
For finance teams running 2026 storage TCO models, the practical implication: the line items that drive the variance on Wasabi, Backblaze, and AWS, egress, minimum-storage-duration, request operations, lifecycle transitions, are either absent on Akave or structured differently. The storage-at-rest line is real and not free. The four lines that drive the variance are not the same lines that move.
Jump straight to the Akave Cloud console to start a free test against your actual data.
What 2026 actually looks like for cloud storage pricing?
The institutions that re-baseline first will catch the rate moves in the 2026 procurement cycle. The ones that don't will catch them in the 2027 budget review, twelve months and one more rate-card revision later.
The era of perpetually declining storage cost ended in 2025. The 2026 picture has Wasabi at $7.99/TB, Backblaze B2 at $6.95/TB, and enterprise SSD contract pricing up roughly 25% in Q4 2025 plus 53–58% in Q1 2026 per TrendForce. The 2027 picture is the same direction with more behind it.
The architecture decision is the procurement decision.
Run the math on your own workload
Pull your last three months of S3 invoices. Add up storage-at-rest, egress, request operations, and minimum-storage-duration charges as separate lines. Then test the same workload against Akave.
You can create an account, generate S3-compatible credentials, and point your existing tooling at Akave in under ten minutes. No commitment, no migration, no rip-and-replace. Start at akave.com. The architecture decision is the procurement decision, but the procurement decision needs your numbers, not ours.
FAQ
Why did Wasabi raise prices in 2026?
Wasabi announced on May 11, 2026 that Pay-as-You-Go pricing will increase to $7.99 USD/TB/month effective July 1, 2026, across all regions. Wasabi stated the adjustment “reflect[s] broader shifts in the global infrastructure landscape, including increased costs for storage hardware, energy, and data center operations driven by growing demand and supply constraints.” Reserved Capacity Storage pricing rebases at the same $7.99 floor for new and renewing contracts on or after July 1.
Did Backblaze raise B2 pricing in 2026?
Yes. Backblaze announced in mid-March 2026 that B2 pay-as-you-go pricing would move to $6.95/TB-month effective May 1, 2026, and that API transaction fees would be removed in the same change. The May 4, 2026 Q1 earnings release confirmed the change and framed it as supporting “continued investment in performance.” The B2 segment grew 24% year-over-year in Q1 2026, with AI customers accounting for more than a third of new bookings.
Why are storage prices going up if AI is making everything more efficient?
AI is driving the supply squeeze, not the efficiency story on storage. AI-driven High Bandwidth Memory demand has reallocated wafer capacity across the memory and storage supply chain. TrendForce data has enterprise SSD contract pricing up roughly 25% QoQ in Q4 2025 and 53–58% QoQ in Q1 2026. Q2 2026 projections push further: conventional DRAM contract prices up 58–63% QoQ and NAND contract prices up 70–75% QoQ. Component costs at this level eventually propagate to cloud storage rates, especially at cost-leader providers who run thinner margins on cold storage.
Is this a short-term spike or a structural shift?
Structural. Industry analysis points to elevated storage component prices through 2027, with relief unlikely before 2028 or 2029. The AI capacity demand reallocating wafer capacity isn't cyclical, it's a multi-year trajectory tied to inference and training deployments scaling.
How is Akave's pricing different from Wasabi or Backblaze?
Akave's storage layer runs on independent storage operators with their own capacity footprints. The pricing inputs aren't tracking the same Tier 1 datacenter capacity competition that's moving Wasabi and Backblaze rates. Egress is not a separate line item. Minimum-storage-duration is not embedded in the rate. The line items that drive variance on the cost-leader providers are either absent or structured differently. The storage-at-rest line is real, no platform is immune to general operator economics, but the cost basis is decoupled from the specific capacity competition driving 2026 rate increases.
Should we move workloads off Wasabi or Backblaze in response to the rate change?
Depends on workload profile and the size of the change. For mid-market and enterprise workloads where storage is a meaningful line item and egress is non-trivial, the math changes enough that a re-evaluation is warranted. For small workloads where storage is a rounding error, switching cost may exceed savings. Run the math on your actual 2026 numbers, the new Wasabi $7.99 rate effective July 1, Backblaze's revised B2 PAYG at $6.95, before deciding.
Sources
- Wasabi, “May 2026: Wasabi Pricing,” docs.wasabi.com/docs/may-2026-wasabi-pricing (published May 11, 2026)
- Backblaze, “B2 Cloud Storage Pricing Update,” Backblaze blog (mid-March 2026 announcement). Hacker News discussion thread id=47414632.
- Backblaze Q1 2026 earnings press release, BusinessWire (May 4, 2026); confirms the $6.95/TB May 1 PAYG rate change and the “continued investment in performance” framing.
- Chris Mellor, “Backblaze beats guidance as AI drives growth,” Blocks & Files (May 5, 2026); SEC-filing-backed Q1 2026 financial summary.
- EverPure (Pure Storage) open letter from CEO Charles Giancarlo, “A Letter to Our Customers on the Current Supply Chain Crisis,” April 23, 2026, purestorage.com newsroom
- TrendForce enterprise SSD contract pricing data, April 2026 update (Q4 2025: ~25% QoQ; Q1 2026: 53–58% QoQ). Q2 2026 forecast: DRAM 58–63% QoQ, NAND 70–75% QoQ. Tom's Hardware coverage of TrendForce Q2 2026 projections.