7 ms·

This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only one

This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.

surgical_fire 4mo ago
And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic. I wish I could say I am disappointed.
- nazgulsenpai 4mo ago
  Idealistically, actual consumer driven capitalism would be much closer to supply/ & demand than this (imo) almost completely artificial, government sponsored bubble. I think pricing before this current bubble reflects that.
  - surgical_fire 4mo ago
    Because, oddly enough, there are a lot more things going on. Government incentives, companies trying to stranglehold markets, FOMO-fueled massive investiment into the current fad, etc. Just to name a few.
- colechristensen 4mo ago
  It is supply and demand but chip supply isn't very elastic and the producers are conservative about adding capacity that won't be needed by the time it's online.
  - dd8601fn 4mo ago
    Doesn’t this presume that chip fabs are betting that the AI boom is a bubble that’s going to pop? Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
    - colechristensen 4mo ago
      Hard to believe that an industry making money hand over fist are reluctant to spend tens of billions expanding capacity that won't come online for years? There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust) You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
    - nyeah 4mo ago
      No. It doesn't have to be a bubble at all. It just has to be a cycle of rapid capital equipment build-out that returns to more normal levels in a few years.
  - kuerbel 4mo ago
    SK Hynix just said they want to double wafer production by 2031.
    - pixl97 4mo ago
      I mean, I want to double the the number of billions of dollars I have by 2031, doesn't mean I will. (actually I have 0 billion and double 0 billion is still 0 billion, so unlike them I'll accomplish that goal).
      - kuerbel 4mo ago
        They already ordered Hanmi equipment and started construction at Yongin Mega Fab. Sounds pretty serious to me.
    - LaGrange 4mo ago
      By 2031 the best employer in Europe will be the water gangs.
    - stymaar 4mo ago
      Nvidia's sales have done x10 over the past three years.
    - murderfs 4mo ago
      That's only a 15% growth per year over 5 years.
- merelydev 4mo ago
  The beauty of supply and demand magic is that the market is now open for anyone that can provide server hosting cheaply.
  - surgical_fire 4mo ago
    Good luck getting the hardware for that eh?
    - merelydev 4mo ago
      I volunteer my laptop, I suggest you and others do the same. We can hook them up in a VPN with E2ee. We just need 1 public IP. Lets Go!
      - jermaustin1 4mo ago
        I like this idea for something akin to p2p shared/sharded hosting.
        merelydev 4mo ago
        Wiregaurd, postgres replication and load balancing can do the job? Lets go: https://matrix.to/#/#hostpool:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#hostpool:matrix.org
    - nijave 4mo ago
      That's the rub. There is no such thing as "anyone that can supply hardware cheaply" Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
  - malfist 4mo ago
    I can't wait for a scrappy startup to spend a couple billion dollars and several years setting up a new fab for chips so we can see the prices go down!
- loveiswork 4mo ago
  What they conveniently leave out is that it sometimes takes over a decade for a correction
  - ocdtrekkie 4mo ago
    The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
- nh23423fefe 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- pocksuppet 4mo ago
  I was also told this. Why isn't it happening? Can some capitalists explain why capitalism isn't happening the way it's supposed to? Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?
  - ssl-3 4mo ago
    Capitalism isn't a magical instant fix. In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production. We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes. But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success. If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous. If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating. (Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
  - Const-me 4mo ago
    “Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?” Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
colechristensen 4mo ago
This is a market shock. The reason it doesn't alleviate sooner is the chip manufacturers are very wary of investing billions on capacity that won't come online until after the shock is over and subsequently going bankrupt. Because that's happened before. IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase. But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.
- seanw444 4mo ago
  > the free investor money does run out I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
  - colechristensen 4mo ago
    And then? There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
    - cassianoleal 4mo ago
      More government money to fund the ever elusive doomsday AI.
    - marcosdumay 4mo ago
      Then it's not their problem and the company can fail.
      - rvnx 4mo ago
        If you owe 1M USD, you have a problem. If you owe 100B USD, they have a problem.
sph 4mo ago
I work on a desktop, but as a backup I have bought a refurbished Dell Latitude, there are a lot of decent ones for €250 on eBay. Put Linux on it, it’s good enough for most workloads. I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  > I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days. I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
  - ornornor 4mo ago
    You might sell it for more but buying a replacement costs even more so you’re losing money either way. The only way is to sell and never look back.
    - drnick1 4mo ago
      I won't sell my 3090. It's still one of the best cards for a local AI and gaming mixed use. I put a waterblock on it and it just purrs along at 50C no matter what I throw at it.
  - jermaustin1 4mo ago
    I have a similar rig, but a 10th gen i7, 128GB of DDR4, 2TB NVMe, and dual RTX 3090s. Built it in 2021 for crypto mining, it ended up paying itself off just before Eth went PoW. I kept it mining even after profitability, because it ran warm enough to heat my apartment leaving my HVAC on fan-only to circulate the heat around. After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine. It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
morkalork 4mo ago
How do these prices compare to buying a PC in the early 90s?
- c-hendricks 4mo ago
  How many 90s computer components went up in price a couple of years after release?
larodi 4mo ago
Sadly this is not a joke nor some doomsday thinking. Google recently repurposed thousands of phones for server needs. Why? Well guess why… to teach everyone tis coming.
- Brybry 4mo ago
  To clarify: UC San Diego is planning to build a cluster of 2000 Pixel phones for computer science class use and Google, in support, helped with a test with 20 phones.
  - glenstein 4mo ago
    Goodness. Thank you for the clarification as this is leagues different than what I originally thought I was reading from the other comment.
  - stymaar 4mo ago
    > Google, in support, helped with a test with 20 phones. Cheapest PR stunt ever.
- michaelt 4mo ago
  Or they did it for positive PR. To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers. And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.
Dylan16807 4mo ago
> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve. In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works. > Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases. For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine. For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
- Gasp0de 4mo ago
  Hyperscalers buy so many CPUs and so much RAM they can dictate prices (to a point) or at least make an agreement to buy at a much lower price but buy X amount for the next 5 years.
  - Dylan16807 4mo ago
    When the market's so hot I don't see why anyone would give them a particularly big discount. And they would have been getting a discount before, so they probably end up seeing a larger percentage spike in what they have to pay. Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
- bayindirh 4mo ago
  > By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve. I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run. ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run". Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead. > I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases. I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day. Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
whatever1 4mo ago
If the hyperscalers demand is persistent, more hardware players will notice and will want a piece of the pie. You already see non traditional players entering. But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
- fnordpiglet 4mo ago
  I’ll wager $5 semiconductor companies are issuing stock to fund capital investment because that’s what you do when these things happen.
TacticalCoder 4mo ago
> I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on. Hmmmm... That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now. I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM. We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure. But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come". Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers. Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM). My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze. Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced. A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers. But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case. Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.
greenavocado 4mo ago
Is everyone forgetting that even hyper scaler hardware has a finite service life that isn't that long as hardware continues to rapidly improve? In a few years the second hand market will be flooded
stymaar 4mo ago
> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. This. People tend to take things for granted, but the world we've grown up with is not guaranteed to live forever, in twenty years personal computing could look like the personal CD or video tapes collection of the 90s-00s: a thing of the past for most people.
- tommica 4mo ago
  It's quite crazy to imagine personal computing to die. It always felt as a staple, that I could always buy components, that someone would manufacturer them and I could cobble together a machine. But now the prices going so high that it kills the market is... just sad.
  - stymaar 4mo ago
    > It always felt as a staple, that I could always buy components, that someone would manufacturer them and I could cobble together a machine. I feel the same. But at the same time the generalization of laptops (with custom motherboard, and soldered parts) and smartphones (custom SoC) means this is already a niche thing. Gamers were the last mass market for upgradeable modular deskops, but a sufficiently long hardware drought would most likely make game editors way more resource conscious, which may kill this niche entirely.
  - chadgpt3 4mo ago
    Personal computing is already dead. We use locked down mobile endpoints that run pre-approved thin client software connecting to giant mainframes over monopolized radio networks.
    - tayo42 4mo ago
      This was the my impression. I don't think laptops and desktops are that popular outside business use anymore?
  - fauigerzigerk 4mo ago
    I don't think component prices will kill personal computing. Prices used to be far higher in the heyday of personal computing. Millions of people buy phones every two years that cost twice as much as a perfectly capable PC. Personal computing in the sense of actually controlling our hardware and software will be killed (or rather degraded) by government regulation and platform oligopolies.

surgical_fire 4mo ago

And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic. I wish I could say I am disappointed.

nazgulsenpai 4mo ago
Idealistically, actual consumer driven capitalism would be much closer to supply/ & demand than this (imo) almost completely artificial, government sponsored bubble. I think pricing before this current bubble reflects that.
- surgical_fire 4mo ago
  Because, oddly enough, there are a lot more things going on. Government incentives, companies trying to stranglehold markets, FOMO-fueled massive investiment into the current fad, etc. Just to name a few.
colechristensen 4mo ago
It is supply and demand but chip supply isn't very elastic and the producers are conservative about adding capacity that won't be needed by the time it's online.
- dd8601fn 4mo ago
  Doesn’t this presume that chip fabs are betting that the AI boom is a bubble that’s going to pop? Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
  - colechristensen 4mo ago
    Hard to believe that an industry making money hand over fist are reluctant to spend tens of billions expanding capacity that won't come online for years? There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust) You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
  - nyeah 4mo ago
    No. It doesn't have to be a bubble at all. It just has to be a cycle of rapid capital equipment build-out that returns to more normal levels in a few years.
- kuerbel 4mo ago
  SK Hynix just said they want to double wafer production by 2031.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    I mean, I want to double the the number of billions of dollars I have by 2031, doesn't mean I will. (actually I have 0 billion and double 0 billion is still 0 billion, so unlike them I'll accomplish that goal).
    - kuerbel 4mo ago
      They already ordered Hanmi equipment and started construction at Yongin Mega Fab. Sounds pretty serious to me.
  - LaGrange 4mo ago
    By 2031 the best employer in Europe will be the water gangs.
  - stymaar 4mo ago
    Nvidia's sales have done x10 over the past three years.
  - murderfs 4mo ago
    That's only a 15% growth per year over 5 years.
merelydev 4mo ago
The beauty of supply and demand magic is that the market is now open for anyone that can provide server hosting cheaply.
- surgical_fire 4mo ago
  Good luck getting the hardware for that eh?
  - merelydev 4mo ago
    I volunteer my laptop, I suggest you and others do the same. We can hook them up in a VPN with E2ee. We just need 1 public IP. Lets Go!
    - jermaustin1 4mo ago
      I like this idea for something akin to p2p shared/sharded hosting.
      - merelydev 4mo ago
        Wiregaurd, postgres replication and load balancing can do the job? Lets go: https://matrix.to/#/#hostpool:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#hostpool:matrix.org
  - nijave 4mo ago
    That's the rub. There is no such thing as "anyone that can supply hardware cheaply" Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
- malfist 4mo ago
  I can't wait for a scrappy startup to spend a couple billion dollars and several years setting up a new fab for chips so we can see the prices go down!
loveiswork 4mo ago
What they conveniently leave out is that it sometimes takes over a decade for a correction
- ocdtrekkie 4mo ago
  The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
nh23423fefe 4mo ago
[flagged]
pocksuppet 4mo ago
I was also told this. Why isn't it happening? Can some capitalists explain why capitalism isn't happening the way it's supposed to? Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?
- ssl-3 4mo ago
  Capitalism isn't a magical instant fix. In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production. We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes. But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success. If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous. If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating. (Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
- Const-me 4mo ago
  “Is it because of government regulations, do we need to deregulate?” Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

colechristensen 4mo ago

This is a market shock. The reason it doesn't alleviate sooner is the chip manufacturers are very wary of investing billions on capacity that won't come online until after the shock is over and subsequently going bankrupt. Because that's happened before. IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase. But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.

seanw444 4mo ago
> the free investor money does run out I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
- colechristensen 4mo ago
  And then? There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
  - cassianoleal 4mo ago
    More government money to fund the ever elusive doomsday AI.
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    Then it's not their problem and the company can fail.
    - rvnx 4mo ago
      If you owe 1M USD, you have a problem. If you owe 100B USD, they have a problem.

sph 4mo ago

I work on a desktop, but as a backup I have bought a refurbished Dell Latitude, there are a lot of decent ones for €250 on eBay. Put Linux on it, it’s good enough for most workloads. I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.

drnick1 4mo ago
> I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days. I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
- ornornor 4mo ago
  You might sell it for more but buying a replacement costs even more so you’re losing money either way. The only way is to sell and never look back.
  - drnick1 4mo ago
    I won't sell my 3090. It's still one of the best cards for a local AI and gaming mixed use. I put a waterblock on it and it just purrs along at 50C no matter what I throw at it.
- jermaustin1 4mo ago
  I have a similar rig, but a 10th gen i7, 128GB of DDR4, 2TB NVMe, and dual RTX 3090s. Built it in 2021 for crypto mining, it ended up paying itself off just before Eth went PoW. I kept it mining even after profitability, because it ran warm enough to heat my apartment leaving my HVAC on fan-only to circulate the heat around. After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine. It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".

morkalork 4mo ago

How do these prices compare to buying a PC in the early 90s?

c-hendricks 4mo ago
How many 90s computer components went up in price a couple of years after release?

larodi 4mo ago

Sadly this is not a joke nor some doomsday thinking. Google recently repurposed thousands of phones for server needs. Why? Well guess why… to teach everyone tis coming.

Brybry 4mo ago
To clarify: UC San Diego is planning to build a cluster of 2000 Pixel phones for computer science class use and Google, in support, helped with a test with 20 phones.
- glenstein 4mo ago
  Goodness. Thank you for the clarification as this is leagues different than what I originally thought I was reading from the other comment.
- stymaar 4mo ago
  > Google, in support, helped with a test with 20 phones. Cheapest PR stunt ever.
michaelt 4mo ago
Or they did it for positive PR. To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers. And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.

Dylan16807 4mo ago

> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve. In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works. > Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance. I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases. For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine. For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.

Gasp0de 4mo ago
Hyperscalers buy so many CPUs and so much RAM they can dictate prices (to a point) or at least make an agreement to buy at a much lower price but buy X amount for the next 5 years.
- Dylan16807 4mo ago
  When the market's so hot I don't see why anyone would give them a particularly big discount. And they would have been getting a discount before, so they probably end up seeing a larger percentage spike in what they have to pay. Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
bayindirh 4mo ago
> By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve. I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run. ...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run". Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead. > I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases. I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day. Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.

whatever1 4mo ago

If the hyperscalers demand is persistent, more hardware players will notice and will want a piece of the pie. You already see non traditional players entering. But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market

fnordpiglet 4mo ago
I’ll wager $5 semiconductor companies are issuing stock to fund capital investment because that’s what you do when these things happen.

TacticalCoder 4mo ago

> I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on. Hmmmm... That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now. I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM. We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure. But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come". Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers. Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM). My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze. Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced. A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers. But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case. Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.

greenavocado 4mo ago

Is everyone forgetting that even hyper scaler hardware has a finite service life that isn't that long as hardware continues to rapidly improve? In a few years the second hand market will be flooded

stymaar 4mo ago

> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing. This. People tend to take things for granted, but the world we've grown up with is not guaranteed to live forever, in twenty years personal computing could look like the personal CD or video tapes collection of the 90s-00s: a thing of the past for most people.

tommica 4mo ago
It's quite crazy to imagine personal computing to die. It always felt as a staple, that I could always buy components, that someone would manufacturer them and I could cobble together a machine. But now the prices going so high that it kills the market is... just sad.
- stymaar 4mo ago
  > It always felt as a staple, that I could always buy components, that someone would manufacturer them and I could cobble together a machine. I feel the same. But at the same time the generalization of laptops (with custom motherboard, and soldered parts) and smartphones (custom SoC) means this is already a niche thing. Gamers were the last mass market for upgradeable modular deskops, but a sufficiently long hardware drought would most likely make game editors way more resource conscious, which may kill this niche entirely.
- chadgpt3 4mo ago
  Personal computing is already dead. We use locked down mobile endpoints that run pre-approved thin client software connecting to giant mainframes over monopolized radio networks.
  - tayo42 4mo ago
    This was the my impression. I don't think laptops and desktops are that popular outside business use anymore?
- fauigerzigerk 4mo ago
  I don't think component prices will kill personal computing. Prices used to be far higher in the heyday of personal computing. Millions of people buy phones every two years that cost twice as much as a perfectly capable PC. Personal computing in the sense of actually controlling our hardware and software will be killed (or rather degraded) by government regulation and platform oligopolies.