A Year of Hetzner Auction Data: Where Did All the Servers Go?

5 min read Original article ↗

Right now, 369 servers are live in Hetzner’s dedicated server auction. Last summer, a typical day had 1,200-1,400. I’ve been tracking the auction for almost a year with Server Radar - here’s what the data looks like.

Volume

In January 2026, 14,300 unique servers passed through the auction. April is on track for under 10,000.

MonthServersvs. prior
Jul 202513,249-
Oct 202512,522-5.5%
Jan 202614,300+14.2%
Feb 202614,089-1.5%
Mar 202613,683-2.9%
Apr 20269,671*-29.3%

*Partial month.

The decline isn’t monotonic. Daily counts show a sawtooth pattern - inventory drops through the week, then partially recovers on Sundays and Mondays when Hetzner appears to cycle new hardware in. But each recovery peaks lower than the last.

PeriodDaily avgDaily low
Feb 2026 (wk 5-8)1,050-1,100912
Early Mar (wk 9-10)750646
Late Mar (wk 12-13)650-690533
Early Apr (wk 14-15)570-610444
Late Apr (wk 16-17)500-530397

The steepest drop was February to early March. Since then the weekly decline has been steadier at 50-80 fewer daily listings per week - no sharp cliff, but no floor yet either.

AMD shrinking faster than Intel

Monthly unique AMD listings went from 5,931 in January to 3,808 in April. Intel dropped from 8,369 to 5,356 over the same period - both declining, but AMD is losing ground faster.

Prices are climbing

RAM (cheapest server price per GB):

MonthECC/GBnon-ECC/GB
Aug 2025EUR 0.14EUR 0.26
Jan 2026EUR 0.16EUR 0.27
Mar 2026EUR 0.20EUR 0.33
Apr 2026EUR 0.21EUR 0.34

ECC appears cheaper per GB than non-ECC because ECC servers typically ship with much more RAM (64-256 GB on Xeon/EPYC boards). The metric is total server price divided by RAM capacity, so a EUR 100 server with 128 GB ECC works out cheaper per GB than a EUR 50 server with 32 GB non-ECC. Both are up significantly from their lows - ECC up 50% from August, non-ECC up 30%.

Storage (cheapest server price per TB, filtered to servers with only one storage type):

MonthHDD/TBNVMe/TBSATA/TB
Jul 2025EUR 0.85EUR 6.24EUR 6.07
Dec 2025EUR 0.90EUR 5.13EUR 5.40
Feb 2026EUR 1.01EUR 4.98EUR 7.07
Apr 2026EUR 0.90EUR 8.60EUR 8.07

Same caveat as RAM - this is the full server price divided by storage capacity. Servers with multiple storage types (~10% of listings) are excluded to avoid double-counting. NVMe per-TB nearly doubled from its February low. HDD stays the most stable.

Average server price:

MonthOverallAMDIntel
Jul 2025EUR 116EUR 147EUR 90
Jan 2026EUR 100EUR 126EUR 77
Mar 2026EUR 89EUR 102EUR 83
Apr 2026EUR 98EUR 104EUR 94

Prices bottomed in March and are now heading back up. Intel saw the sharpest single-month jump: EUR 83 to EUR 94.

The mix is shifting: which CPUs are disappearing

The decline isn’t uniform across CPU models. Comparing January to April unique listings:

Disappearing fastest:

CPUJanAprChange
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X1,138403-65%
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X1,531544-64%
Intel Core i5-12500483191-60%
AMD EPYC 7502P1,195616-49%
Intel Core i7-87001,400758-46%

Growing:

CPUJanAprChange
AMD Ryzen 7 7700175561+221%
Intel Core i9-13900161453+181%
AMD Ryzen 5 36007331,255+71%

Hetzner is actively adding newer hardware - Ryzen 7 7700 and i9-13900 tripled in volume. But the mid-to-high-end workstation chips (EPYC 7502P, Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 7 3700X) are getting cleaned out faster than they’re replenished. The old budget Xeons (E5-1650V3, E3-1275v5) are barely moving in either direction.

High-RAM servers vanish first

Servers with 128 GB+ RAM dropped from 5,949 unique listings in February to 3,472 in April - a 42% decline, steeper than the overall market.

GPU servers: unchanged

GPU-equipped servers hover around 200-250 unique listings per month. Hetzner has never had deep GPU auction inventory and that hasn’t changed.

What I don’t know

The data shows the what clearly enough. The why is less obvious.

The monthly unique count tells us directly that fewer servers are entering the auction - this isn’t just faster buying, it’s reduced supply. What I can’t tell is why. Possible explanations: Hetzner is retaining hardware for their cloud product, running out of decommissioned stock, or finding that rising hardware costs make it uneconomical to keep older machines running in the auction at current price points (power, rack space, and support aren’t free).

One data point worth noting: Hetzner raised prices on April 1st. The auction got a modest 3% bump, but standard dedicated servers went up 30-40%. That makes the auction a comparatively better deal than before - which could be increasing demand pressure on an already shrinking pool.

The decline became visible in February, with the steepest drop between February and early March (daily averages fell by ~300 in two weeks). Since then the rate has been slowing - weekly drops of 50-80 rather than 150+. The freefall phase appears to be over, but there’s no sign of a floor yet. The CPU model data also shows Hetzner is actively restocking with newer hardware (Ryzen 7 7700, i9-13900), so it’s not that the auction is being wound down - it’s that certain segments are being cleared out faster than they’re replenished.

The data is public

All of this comes from Server Radar’s statistics page, which updates every five minutes. Set up a price alert if you’re watching for a specific configuration.