Are you really not aware of the AI companies buying up literally entire years worth of upcoming manufacturing capability to fuel their data center needs? It's been wreaking havoc all across the IT space for a while now. It started with RAM and GPUs but it's expanded to storage and I believe even CPUs are spiking as well now, but don't quote me on that. Just bubble levels of demand for hardware across the board and it's really revealed the fragility of the industry's ability to supply hardware given how few manufacturers for the actual chipsets there actually are and just how costly (both in time, money and specialized knowledge) it is to actually build out more production capability.
Shit's wild out there when companies use the fake and gayness of the stock market to finance infinite hardware purchases and the real world can't crank out enough hardware to meet that absurd demand. Consumer grade products aren't even part of the equation anymore. Crucial, which used to be my go-to brand for SSDs and sometimes RAM was outright gutted because its parent company ran the math and decided that there was zero reason to continue serving the retail customer when there was orders of magnitude more money to be made focusing solely on components for data centers.
I'm aware of people talking about AI huge buying leading to increased prices. I just didn't know or wasn't sure how much is opportunistic price raising that doesn't reflect reality. Like how fast food used "covid" to justify sit down restaurant prices for what is supposed to be 5 dollar meals. I never believed the economic justification from fast food.
I don't follow closely enough or are aware of all the ins and outs to know if the AI was the reason to hike prices or the excuse to hike prices, or if it's a mix of both.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's a non-zero amount of "oh hey this is a good opportunity to jack up the price and blame it on data centers", but the disrupted market is real. It's a large part of why Trump make a big government investment in Intel in my estimation. The inability to supply our own chips domestically represented a national security threat that got revealed by the AI demand spike.
Yeah, I fed this conversation into AI and it's indeed bleak. I wanted to get a new mega HDD like 20 Tb to store full libraries of games, including PS3 before the internet archive gets inevitably shut down in our draconian times. 22 TB 1 year ago was like 200 something dollars.
Now it's 550 dollars. I have the pressure of wanting to wait until the price is lower, but also concerned if I wait too long, the ability to download huge libraries like PS3 will become shut down. We're so close to being like North Korea with internet. Very little is standing in the way of that, so I wanted an archive of roms before the inevitable happens.
Price hikes and drops are generally the best economic signals that exist because they are completely public and they depend on people's real buying decisions. Regardless of the motives involved, if companies charge more and people continue to pay it, the market will be flooded with supply until a new equilibrium is reached, because there's money to be made. Gas prices shoot up in disaster areas, then return to normalcy as supply increases.
I'm aware that this assumes a free market, which we don't have in several respects, but it does hold generally true. For example, publishers initially tried to hold the line at high prices for ebooks, but the market has kept things relatively reasonable.
Flash makers are limited by water supply, and most modern memory and logic products are operating as zero sum markets, right now. Growth exists, but it can be sped up to meet demand, not by a long shot. Micron also went all in on AI product production, and Hynix is heavily leaning into it.
The big HDD makers all seem to have some institutional history and wisdom. Tbey are selling like crazy, but not changing any major plans. WD and Seagate are very much acting like this is a bubble (it is), and will pass. They are selling out into the future, but not doing anything that would put them in higher risk if it were to crash next week. Good for their profits and company health, but ad for our wallets.
What is going on with companies? It's just absurd
A few months ago I could get a large HDD for like 200 bucks. Checked back like two weeks later and it was like 500 bucks.
It should be illegal all the price hiking. Maybe it is. I'm not an economist.
Are you really not aware of the AI companies buying up literally entire years worth of upcoming manufacturing capability to fuel their data center needs? It's been wreaking havoc all across the IT space for a while now. It started with RAM and GPUs but it's expanded to storage and I believe even CPUs are spiking as well now, but don't quote me on that. Just bubble levels of demand for hardware across the board and it's really revealed the fragility of the industry's ability to supply hardware given how few manufacturers for the actual chipsets there actually are and just how costly (both in time, money and specialized knowledge) it is to actually build out more production capability.
Shit's wild out there when companies use the fake and gayness of the stock market to finance infinite hardware purchases and the real world can't crank out enough hardware to meet that absurd demand. Consumer grade products aren't even part of the equation anymore. Crucial, which used to be my go-to brand for SSDs and sometimes RAM was outright gutted because its parent company ran the math and decided that there was zero reason to continue serving the retail customer when there was orders of magnitude more money to be made focusing solely on components for data centers.
I'm aware of people talking about AI huge buying leading to increased prices. I just didn't know or wasn't sure how much is opportunistic price raising that doesn't reflect reality. Like how fast food used "covid" to justify sit down restaurant prices for what is supposed to be 5 dollar meals. I never believed the economic justification from fast food.
I don't follow closely enough or are aware of all the ins and outs to know if the AI was the reason to hike prices or the excuse to hike prices, or if it's a mix of both.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's a non-zero amount of "oh hey this is a good opportunity to jack up the price and blame it on data centers", but the disrupted market is real. It's a large part of why Trump make a big government investment in Intel in my estimation. The inability to supply our own chips domestically represented a national security threat that got revealed by the AI demand spike.
Yeah, I fed this conversation into AI and it's indeed bleak. I wanted to get a new mega HDD like 20 Tb to store full libraries of games, including PS3 before the internet archive gets inevitably shut down in our draconian times. 22 TB 1 year ago was like 200 something dollars.
Now it's 550 dollars. I have the pressure of wanting to wait until the price is lower, but also concerned if I wait too long, the ability to download huge libraries like PS3 will become shut down. We're so close to being like North Korea with internet. Very little is standing in the way of that, so I wanted an archive of roms before the inevitable happens.
Price hikes and drops are generally the best economic signals that exist because they are completely public and they depend on people's real buying decisions. Regardless of the motives involved, if companies charge more and people continue to pay it, the market will be flooded with supply until a new equilibrium is reached, because there's money to be made. Gas prices shoot up in disaster areas, then return to normalcy as supply increases.
I'm aware that this assumes a free market, which we don't have in several respects, but it does hold generally true. For example, publishers initially tried to hold the line at high prices for ebooks, but the market has kept things relatively reasonable.
Flash makers are limited by water supply, and most modern memory and logic products are operating as zero sum markets, right now. Growth exists, but it can be sped up to meet demand, not by a long shot. Micron also went all in on AI product production, and Hynix is heavily leaning into it.
The big HDD makers all seem to have some institutional history and wisdom. Tbey are selling like crazy, but not changing any major plans. WD and Seagate are very much acting like this is a bubble (it is), and will pass. They are selling out into the future, but not doing anything that would put them in higher risk if it were to crash next week. Good for their profits and company health, but ad for our wallets.