Not all unitary operations upon a set of qubits can be implemented by sequential interactions between each qubit and an ancillary system. We analyze the specific case of sequential quantum cloning, 1-->M, and prove that the minimal dimension D of the ancilla grows linearly with the number of clones M. In particular, we obtain D=2M for symmetric universal quantum cloning and D=M+1 for symmetric phase-covariant cloning. Furthermore, we provide a recipe for the required ancilla-qubit interactions in each step of the sequential procedure for both cases.