And now the press are calling us 'device hoarders' for taking good care of our shit and not wanting to upgrade to new devices too.
this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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You mean the shortage that's purposefully engineered to price everyone out of the market and push them onto the cloud?
I don't think it was purposefully engineered. I'm pretty sure it takes over a decade to ramp up production.
It's RAM, they can ramp it up in 2-3 years tops.
They just don't want to. When they did it last time demand plummeted and we got cheap RAM.
For my 64 GB 6000 CL30 I paid 200€ last year. They don't want a repeat of that, especially with the Chinese now catching up.
It makes sense that they are reluctant to make investments. Building new data centers will presumably require more new RAM units then maintaining those that are already in existence. The large influx of new infrastructure is a temporary condition.
Regardless, a quick Google search indicates that about a half a trillion dollars has recently been spent on building new foundries in the United States. Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 coincides with the spike in demand, we are only just at the point where these investments could come into fruition.
i'm convinced corporations want us all to soon be using shitty computers like Chromebooks running everything in the cloud.
You're absolutely correct. They want their app on your devices and they want you permanently signed into whatever bullshit service they're promoting.
Pretty sure that shortage would be indefinite. Same for consumer GPUs. Maybe some other tech shortages will appear.
The new shortage crisis will be in the energy sector.They will want to conserve energy resources and will therefore implement daily planned power outages. They will then transfer this saved energy to AI-like technology companies and the military.
Then the prices will come back down, right?
Right?
Yes, they will
All we can hope for is that the AI bubble bursts very suddenly, and the manufacturers/distributors are left with a huge amount of excess stock and production capacity that will oversaturate the market.
DDR4 RAM prices did drop back down after a huge peak in 2018 caused by smartphones, although this is a much larger scale issue so who knows how it'll play out.
The AI RAM is HBM. It's useless for a PC unless someone releases a desktop graphics card that uses it.
If only we lived in a country with consumer protection and anti-monopoly laws.
enforcement of existing consumer protection and anti-monopoly laws would do wonders(or tax, wage and hour, vehicle and many others). We actually have some pretty decent laws, they have either been deliberately underfunded, avoided per lobby or overruled by appointed activist judges.
Pretty much the only way out is fire and force it seems, as history shows.
Yep, I remember growing up some application of those laws or at least a facade. RICO exists for a reason lol. But I guess since corporations have become so bored with their hoard of gold and following some rules they've decided to take the painful route of learning, again
Restricted Access Memory
Restricted AI Memory
Oh that's even better
RAIM
RAID: Restricted AI Data
AHCI: Actually Human-Controlled Information
Depends on when the AI bubble pops.
Waiting for the "waiting for ai bubble to pop" bubble to pop at this point.
I've been researching this a bit... I've come to the conclusion that there is no AI bubble. In fact, we're only just getting started down this road. Unless there's some massive 100x efficiency breakthrough in training AI and inference, the entire world is going to be building seemingly endless AI data centers (and the normal compute kind, e.g. for stuff like AWS, Google/YouTube, Meta, banks) for at least a decade. Probably a little longer (12-15 years before demand levels out).
Everyone thinks that "AI data center" means ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc but there's 10,000x more demand for AI than those services. Think: Pharmaceutical companies trying to find proteins, scientists (and big agriculture!) trying to model the weather, and other businesses trying to automate stuff. Not just software; robots and things like conveyor belts.
Another example: Ever use one of those self-checkouts that's mostly just a camera pointing down, where you place the stuff you're purchasing? That uses AI too.
Having said that, there is a great big bubble in AI: OpenAI, specifically. That will definitely pop one day. And hopefully, the DRAM bullshit will go along with it.
Those other things aren't the bubble though, the bubble is about generative AI, not other machine learning methods
Yeah, the LLM and picture generation bubble will burst but that isn't 'AI', it's a tiny subset of tasks that happen to be easy to train because the companies involved have helped themselves to all of the text and images created by humanity.
The other uses of AI are harder to train, because we don't have centuries worth of robotic motion data or a YouTube of folded protein data. Those are the uses that will have the most impact in the future, as they are developed.
LLMs are a bubble, AI is not.
LLMs are the only thing that is hyped. The other models and applications have existed already back when ChatGPT first hit the public and they have not had any special break through that would explain exponential growth in investment or a need for compute power. Language models had that with the transformer structure, everything else just develops iteratively.
The bubble we see now is because of language models and we can try and conflate it with other deep models and call it all AI, but it doesn't change the fact that the generative models are the only ones requiring these resources and are looking for a problem to solve.
I agree with it not being all chatgpt type, but considering that even nvidia was hyping it up as war tech I think this is a bit of wishful thinking.
Their data centers are flammable. Just sayin'
They're really not though.
(Obviously, don't do crimes.) That being said, a warehouse full of toilet paper is flammable... a warehouse full of aluminum racks and silicon isn't.
In addition, their fire suppression systems don't use water and so any fire that you did manage to create would be suppressed without affecting operation.
... thats kinda counter productive... they would order more hardware
Their CEOs are flammable too. Just sayin'
Someone tried the home
Also if the AI bubble does pop and they have to liquidate all these data centers, that's less stuff for us to buy on the fire sale
Losing money in hardware, insurance premiums, increased security are all nice effects though.
Doesn't help shortages tho
Would they actually be able to afford it? Investors have been throwing endless amounts of money onto the fire but in OpenAI's case at least, it was all essentially bought like "I'll pay you later, trust me", right?
I'd assume convincing companies twice that you're trustworthy enough to buy the world's supply of RAM with an IOU wouldn't be possible but I guess I thought the same thing for the first time as well
edit: either way, I'd take a longer period of expensive RAM if it meant a giant "fuck you" to the AI companies
And the recipe is simple as well. Just need a good throwing hand.
Perhaps a slingshot?
Specialize it for electronic fires send a message simultaneously
Drones ,lots and lots of drones with petrol bombs
Samgung
Yes that is a major electronics manufacturer.
If it is, I've never heard of it and they have zero online presense on the English web.
Well, acktually, you've never heard of it because it is a text string and you can't hear text strings you can only read them.
Troof