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.
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.
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.
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.