I really hope this is a temporary supply bottleneck. I understand the constraints of producing chips and highly specialized hardware but AI demand is only going to go up from here.
I’m optimistic a game changer gets whipped out of thin air
It’s not really going up…
I got bored with it last year, and have turned off everything but search summaries, as they often just put the answer right up front, no click throughs. Also I use a voice aid to set timers, reminders, and alarms…
And this seems to be a common story lately.
I can’t see AI really exploding beyond basic uses like that. Some people are still inovating and playing with AI, but it’ll settle down.
I just have bouth 12TB WD off their site last month. Checked right now - Sales Inquiry instead of Add to cart. Rip…
SSDs, microSD cards, and now HDDs? They’re really pushing it.
Don’t forget RAM.
Was looking at NVMEs, only $1500 for a small no name Gen 3 with 3gbps max transfer rate.
Some newer and faster name brand drives were listed as $400-500, but they were also out of stock, so those prices probably weren’t accurate.
I’m so fucking over this bullshit.
The HC530s drives I bought in Nov are 40% more expensive now. My local computer store used to sell 16TB Barracudas for CAD $250 last year. They’re $400 now and only available in-store.
I’m afraid that a lot of the infrastructure will be heavily catered towards DoD computing resources. This means after the components hit their lifecycle, they aren’t released to the used markets on ebay, instead they are shredded and rendered electronic waste.
All of those GPUs will be irrelevent in 24 months, and almost all of them are useless to consumers.
Its by design, its intentional.
They want you hooked to their cloud teat.
A lot of scientists, tinkerers, 3D renderers and such would love cheap A100s and up.
On the contrary, I don’t think they will get cheaper. Somehow they’ll get bought back and trashed (like Nvidia has done in the past), hoarded, tasked with busywork, something that that.
They wont let them leave because it’d be falling into “the competitions” hands.
They’ll shred every single last bit of silicon.
Bullshit. I call 100% bullshit.
Wdym? Do you believe the manufacturers would try to congincr you they’re out of stock to create scarcity and increace prices?!? Do you jnow how silly that idea is?! \s
Those datacenters are real. AI companies aren’t using their money to build empty buildings. They’re buying enormous amounts of computer hardware off the market to fill them.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/18/inside-the-worlds-most-powerful-ai-datacenter/
Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin, we also have multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US.
These AI datacenters are significant capital projects, representing tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips, and will seamlessly connect with our global Microsoft Cloud of over 400 datacenters in 70 regions around the world. Through innovation that can enable us to link these AI datacenters in a distributed network, we multiply the efficiency and compute in an exponential way to further democratize access to AI services globally.
An AI datacenter is a unique, purpose-built facility designed specifically for AI training as well as running large-scale artificial intelligence models and applications. Microsoft’s AI datacenters power OpenAI, Microsoft AI, our Copilot capabilities and many more leading AI workloads.
The new Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin stands as a remarkable feat of engineering, covering 315 acres and housing three massive buildings with a combined 1.2 million square feet under roofs. Constructing this facility required 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping.
Unlike typical cloud datacenters, which are optimized to run many smaller, independent workloads such as hosting websites, email or business applications, this datacenter is built to work as one massive AI supercomputer using a single flat networking interconnecting hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs. In fact, it will deliver 10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.
Hard drives haven’t been impacted nearly much as memory, which is the real bottleneck, but when just one AI company, OpenAI, rolls up and buys 40% of global memory production capacity’s output, it’d be extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t see memory shortages for at least a while, since it takes years to build new production capacity. And then you have other AI companies who want memory. And purchases of memory from companies who are, as a one-off, extending their PC upgrade cycle, due to the current shortage who will also be competing for supply. If you have less supply relative to demand of a product, price goes up to the new point where the available amount of memory people are willing to buy at that new price point matches what’s actually available. Everyone else gets priced out. And it won’t be until either demand drops (which is what people talking about a ‘bubble popping’ are thinking might occur, if the AI-infrastructure-building effort stops sooner than expected), or enough new production capacity comes online to provide enough supply, that that’ll change. Memory manufacturers are building new factories and expanding existing ones, and we’ve had articles about that. But it takes years to do that.
25% of the datacenters being constructed right now will go bankrupt.
The majority of this AI surge is for datacenters that neither have power nor water.
Its all gonna end up being shredded, if it exists at all.
It is not this case, I agree, but to be honest it would not be the first time that some company create an artificial scarcity to keep the prices up.
Sort of, there used to be way more HDD manufacturers and then they all talked each other into dropping them for SDDs. Now a sudden need arises and there are no HDDs.
When Trump threatened tariffs I went ahead and bought 50 TB of storage. With my then expansion it would easily last me until the end of Trump’s turn and maybe a decade if I rationed.
Turns out that was one of my best calls of judgements to date, just not for the reason I thought.
I bought 10kg of Playadito Yerba Mate at the beginning of 2025, should also have thought about storage, now I have to start cleaning up.
Never thought I would see Playadito being mentioned here, but nice to see another fellow mate drinker.
3 months ago, watching ram prices skyrocketing, anticipating this exact scenario would happen, i bought 5 10tb drives.
best decision i’ve made in a while.
That’s retirement money right there.
I ordered a couple of NAS drives during the holiday specials thinking the same thing. Received a confirmation email saying they would ship in a few days. 4 weeks passed without a single peep from WD. Started to get nervous my order would be cancelled. Then first week of January I got an email saying they were backordered but should be fulfilled “soon”. Didn’t get my drives till end of January but well worth the wait.
Bought a bunch of 20s a while back. My only concern now is if (when) one of them dies, I might not be able to get the same one (or any at all).
Nice. I got three 14TBs around the same time for the same reason glad I did.
They could garner good will by setting aside a % of their stock to sell to red-blooded people at a lower price…
If someone walks into a grocery store before a storm and wants to buy 10 pallets of water, the store tells them to fuck off.
Then scalpers would buy them and jack the price up.
limit to one per customer per day like most tcg sellers do with pokemon and magic.
I’m sure there’s ways around that. Different cards, PO boxes, email addresses, names. Even if they had only 4 ways of buying that’s still almost 30 buys a week times however many scalpers there are.
obviously there will be a handful of people pulling that shit but every system basically assumes that 10% of the people using the system will use it unethically to their advantage. just balance around that, as the vast majority aren’t exploitive scumbags.
You’re asking a lot of an already uncaring system. 10% can do plenty of damage.
That’s because they’re guaranteed to sell all the water when there’s a storm anyway. There’s a reason there’s laws against raising prices in an emergency.
I consider not having access to reasonably-priced hardware an emergency ;(
That’s 1 day. Guaranteed if someone walked in and said “I want to buy all the water you can sell for the next 9 months”, they’d be singing a very different tune.
Getting a half dozen 24tb nas drives this morning was painful. They are twice the cost of last fall and most vendors, even big ones, only had one or two available. This is insanity.
I recently had a drive fail in my 4 bay nas. Amusingly, synology branded drives seem like they’re pretty close to p ice parity with OE drives these days.
Free market totally regulating itself like we’ve always been told.
The part the people peddling the Free Market as self regulating never say is that only markets with no barriers to entry like for soap or teddy bears are actually Free and most are no such thing.
I think even both teddybears and soap are quite regulated markets in EU, could probably require a capital to enter the market a lot larger than you would think, to get anywhere beyond the local flea market level of sales.
The thing is most of that comes from early market theory that almost universally had a warning not to do or allow this type of shit.
"Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
How can you doubt the Invisible Hand? Have you not seen how much it jerks?
Yeah… but the slop!
And all that so big tech can spy on you better.
Hope they like seeing my weiner get tugged 4 times a day.
