Its mixed. Some of it really is Covid toilet paper behavior. Datacenter customers, for example, have repair parts on hand; boxes of harddrives/ssds waiting to

Its mixed. Some of it really is Covid toilet paper behavior. Datacenter customers, for example, have repair parts on hand; boxes of harddrives/ssds waiting to be put in, boxes of consumable parts, DIMMs waiting to replace ones that went faulty, entire machines already racked and waiting to take over for their fallen siblings, etc. Some of these customers added more to the spare parts pile. The big clouds manage their elastic demand of any sort of consumable or repair parts in volumes that are described in terms that fit cargo trucks in a quarterly basis, and they've already compensated. Now, otoh, you have the truly psychotic people, that fill their basements with toilet paper, just hoarding more than they could ever use in their entire life. We've all seen that story where a guy was going to lose his house because he blew his mortgage money on toilet paper, and was selling it at a loss just to stay afloat. People like this exist in every crisis, and there's gonna be a headline in the near future where someone is gonna lose their house because they had like a hundred trays of DIMMs in their basement. A few people I know who scrape eBay like its their job for electronics are just waiting for people to start fire-selling DIMMs and SSDs that got hoarded and they couldn't scalp people over; they're expecting half of MSRP or better sometime later this year.