Wonderful.
This reminds me of those morons that run out to buy ALL the toilet paper to sell later.
Except it’s the toilet paper manufacturers that are hoarding all their product because there are these billionaire fuck-bags that are promising to produce a massive pile of shit and will pay anything to have ALL the toilet paper.
That a shitty analogy… But a good one.
Imagine if we put this level of effort into something objectively positive for the human race.
Instead they are destroying environments and communities and guzzling water and power.
Enshitification abounds
Theoretically it should be. We can stop working most jobs and spend our time enjoying ourselves.
Too bad that won’t happen.
Imagine if they put all that money into developing a decent product that might return some actual revenue.
Nah, let use all these PC components for something wasteful.
stupid idiots
You know what’s crazy about this AI bullshit. I’ve been wanting to buy a micro SD card for my tablet but the hard drive shortage has caused the price of micro SD cards to double in the past few months, so I might not be able to anytime soon. The only one that’s reasonably priced is from Silicon Power, which is a brand that I’ve never even heard of before.
I have one, I bought it directly from them on their website. Its pretty decent for the price. It hasn’t failed in a few years so that’s good.
Silicon Power
They’ve been around for a long time, they’re decent.
even flashdrives have gotten more expensive
Idk, I still see 256GB Emtec ones for 10€ in my local supermarket.
Terminator said AI would destroy humanity. We just didn‘t know it would be with hoarding of natural and manufactured resources to fuel an idiocracy. No pitched and desperate war for the survival of humanity, just a necrosis eating us alive for the quarterly report.
“AI” truly ruins everything.
What did AL do this time‽
You mean capitalism I think.
On hardware costs, if it produces a large, sustained amount of demand, and if there are fixed costs (e.g. R&D) that can be shared between hardware used for it and other things, it may substantially reduce hardware prices in the long run for other users.
Suppose, to take an example, that there is demand for, oh, completely pulling a number out of the air, 4 times the amount of high bandwidth memory for AI that there is for 3D video cards and video game consoles. That’s on a sustained basis, not just our initial AI buildout. There is going to be some amount of fixed costs that have to be done at Micron and Samsung and the like to figure out how to design the product and optimize production.
That’s going to mean that AI users likely pay something like 80% of the fixed costs for HBM, which may very well lower costs for other users of HBM.
In late 2025 and 2026 there is a huge surge in demand for hardware. There’s a shortage of hardware, and factories don’t get built out overnight. So prices skyrocket, pricing out many users to the point where demand at the new price point matches the available supply. But as production capacity increases, that will also ease.
I do get that it’s frustrating if someone wants to build a system right now.
But scale matters a lot, and this may enable a lot more scale.
The reason I can have a cheap Linux desktop at home isn’t because there are masses of people buying Linux desktops, but because there are huge numbers of businesses out there buying Windows desktops and many of the fixed hardware development costs are shared. If those businesses running Windows desktops suddenly disappeared tomorrow, I probably couldn’t afford my home Linux desktop, because suddenly I’d need to be paying a lot more of the fixed costs.
In late 2025 and 2026 there is a huge surge in demand for hardware. There’s a shortage of hardware, and factories don’t get built out overnight. So prices skyrocket, pricing out many users to the point where demand at the new price point matches the available supply. But as production capacity increases, that will also ease.
And this is where your entire idea falls apart… The manufacturers have openly stated that they have zero interest in expanding production. They’re trying to avoid a supply surplus after the boom ends, and they know that expanding production now means crashed prices later. Why expand production, when you can simply not spend that money and charge higher prices anyways?
Even if everything you say comes true I still don’t see the prices coming back down. They never did after covid
Covid produced inflation, where the strength of the currency dropped. The Federal Reserve wouldn’t permit deflation, because you’d risk seeing a deflationary spiral. Instead, it’ll just see wages increase more quickly than prices for a period afterwards to restore buying power. This is a specific product that’s seeing a shortage — you can list plenty of points in the past where a good was in short supply and prices rose and then fell.
EDIT: Just in computer hardware, to pick an example, hard drive prices went up when we had that flooding in southeast Asia fifteen years back.
Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world’s production.[76] Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital’s, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives…As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.
Instead, it’ll just see wages increase more quickly than prices for a period afterwards to restore buying power.
Good one!
I get what you’re saying, but weren’t big manufacturers committing to NOT expand production capacities? I can’t remember where I read it, but it felt more like they were just gonna hedge their bets and not build out in the near term.
Not to mention, this all sounds and looks like commitments and not actual orders. It just feels like they’re all playing with imaginary money and when the AI bubble bursts, and all those commitments up and disappear like a fart in the wind, those benefits of scale are also going to disappear and the prices will just stay high.
No, they’re definitely also expanding.
Not all of them, certainly, but there are a few plans for new factories. Samsung, for instance, is rolling out a new chip factory, if you want something to search.
In other news grocery stores are out of tomatoes, because AI.
Oh fuck…
I just need two more 8TB drives so I can complete my NAS, that is all. Don’t blow up now! Please…
):
Looks like somebody’s going to be buying hard drives with Affirm lol
I’m tempted to just say "good, less WD drives around ". But there aren’t a lot, if any, good manufacturers left. What we actually get is probably more Seagate, which is even worse.
We still have Toshiba.
I like their drives.My favorite as well.
We’re not getting more anything. AI is taking it all up
After the pop there will be plenty of 2nd hand components that were never used or are slightly used.
they will all go to the shredder. ain’t got any time to sell to the poors
Unfortunately none of it will be RAM because all the fabs are making HBM, not DRAM.
I think hbm is not consumer tech cause it’s expensive, otherwise it’s just superior. I assume if the market is flooded with the stuff there will be a drive for compatible components
