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 fact that there’s been a massive expansion in the nonconsumer market means the consumer market makes up a smaller proportion of the overall market, but it doesn’t mean the consumer market is any smaller than it used to be.