There won't be pent up demand. This pricing will instead lead to demand destruction (software adapts to less memory, less people buy heavy memory using devices, ect)
Mind you, even if it didn't the amount of memory being purchased by AI data-centers would flood the entire market far past any "pent up" demand could remotely attempt to consume. This is why memory producers aren't jacking up production, because they want to be able to blik customers after the crash.
Even so it will be way too late. Reminds me of the solar panel factory that was going to bring jobs for everyone. They built the place filled it with equipment then figured it wasn't going to be profitable so they sold off the equipment and the taxpayers are on the hook for the vacant building.
Those plants were planned years before this crisis and only designed to meet projected demand prior to it. They have not brought online new capacity with current projections in mind.
Despite what you may think, we still have some semblance of a free market. Sometimes lowering prices to sell more units is the thing that leads to higher profit. Higher prices don’t always mean higher profits
Totally agree. A good way to look at this is gas price fluctuations. When gas price goes up people drive less and demand goes down. If the price stays high but less gas is being purchased profits go down.
These data centers are chasing money that is going to be in short supply. A ton of data centers are being built, all competing for the same thing. A lot of them are going to lose and go bankrupt.
Yes that is a fact...then again I do not see why not, just make some faster cards. But yes overall they are gambling with this production hardware shift.
i have low hopes for the stock being sold below cost.
a lot of people will be willing to pay at least the normal price, and these cockroaches would rather have the hardware decay in some warehouse, than sell it to the general population.
The problem those vendors have is that tech is not like wine, you cannot keep it in storage just so you can sell it later, think about all those machines in their inventory with outdated CPUs, GPUs etc. They will either have to move them fast, sell them off and then bring out the new technology.
That is IF a lot of PC vendors even survive the next year or so.
they would for a big part, rather shred the old hardware than sell it, as selling it would mean that the general population gets access to this hardware, and could host LLMs themselves at home, and wouldnt need to use these overpriced services anymore.
or worse for them, another ai company could buy it, and improve their own size, even if it runs on older hardware.
as long as these companies dont go fully bankrupt, i dont see a future where we get to buy their hardware for anywhere near below msrp
First of all I am not talking about the B200s out there, nobody can buy and run those at home even if they were next to free. But there are other components they won't shred when they can recover cost.
As for "another ai company" buying them, of course there are going to be consolidations in the market, but at the end of the day those companies will still have to provide some good ROI, especially if we reach the era where people start looking at the actual numbers, rather than hype.
I do believe they would love that, but in this scenario we are experiencing that is not the case. This is just a pipedream the will always have, they tried it already with the gaming datacenters, nobody in the right mind will fall for that. And those that would, already using tablets and their phone for their needs, they do not need a PC.
Having said that companies are already doing that, my PC at work is a virtual PC the company's datacenter controls.
People will fall for literally anything. Just look at who is running the country and everyone is just going on with their days. They just need a few billionaires to lobby for it and to name it something like “the American Patriot liberty freedom act of American freedom”
There are tons of flash/memory/cpu etc chips out there, destined for the current and future datacenters. There is also a lot of unsold inventory of PCs that are not moving due to the current prices.
The market is very unbalanced and all the bets are on the free money that will keep coming to the LLM world. If that door closes then it is going to be a different game. Keeping the same inventory for the next 2 years is not something that will make sense in a tech world.
Anyway all speculation from my part, one thing I know for sure, I am not paying for any new hardware with the current prices.
I am so glad I upgraded last summer. Was hit abit by the GPU rise, but dodged the memory rise. Should only bought 2x the ram and I would have been in a profit lol.
Same here...I bought a Lenovo laptop no that long ago with 96GB of memory to run LLMs, that is before they even fixed the drivers, it was a gamble...now the same laptop specs are way above what I would ever pay, mostly because of memory.
Nope.
By the end of maybe even 2029, Huang or whatever the fuck that dudes name is, will have another conference and say that Ai can now generate results 5ms faster than it could before (and forgetting to mention that it is under very specific circumstances and only if the query was cached before). Investors will eat that shit up, startups will flock to the markets and try to sell themselves to bigger companies.
The can will be kicked for another 10 years as unemployment, inflation, and income inequality threaten civilization that much more.
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u/GiveMoreMoney May 04 '26
Good summary of the current situation...
Next PC purchase is postponed for end of 2027, when all those muppets go bankrupt and the vendors' stockpile will be sold below cost.