Hold on to Your Hardware

A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.

マリウス

A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars.

There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time.

The AI boom/"hyperscale" currently is almost exactly like the dotcom boom.

It's already starting to shake down. Anthropic is occupying the developer space, OpenAI has just exited the video/media production space. More focused and vertical market AI is emerging.

The current vortice of money between OpenAI <-> Microsoft <-> Oracle <-> NVidea <-> Google <-> etc etc is going to break.

> Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening

Yes but these Chinese firms are a tiny share of the overall RAM/SSD market, and they'll have the same problems with expanding production as everyone else. So it doesn't actually help all that much.

The biggest problem in expanding for everyone else is they don't trust the market to exist for long enough to be worth paying for a new factory so they are not investing in it. The Chinese might be small, but they think the market will exist and are investing. Will they be right or wrong - I don't know.