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Will that be enough for AI's hunger?
by amelius 6d ago
Will that be enough for AI's hunger?
- heaney-555 6d agoNot even close.
- gs17 6d agoSamsung is already building another fab (which was originally suspended due to low memory prices years ago). Hopefully when it goes live in a few years it's not all dedicated to HBM for AI.
- GoToRO 6d agoIt will be just in time for when AI will run very well on consumer hardware and the need for data centers will collapse.
- EA-3167 6d agoOr even more amusing in time for the bubble to burst, I hope the big RAM makers end up holding the whole bag for that. Greedy bastards.
- bethekidyouwant 6d agoSince you’re not greedy when there is a memory glut I’m sure you’ll be willing to pay extra to make it fair.
- EA-3167 6d agoNot at all, I’m going to relax with a cooling drink and watch the consequences of this unbelievably destructive and wasteful venture implode. I also adore the idea that it's on the customer to be "fair" to a company that dumped us a group in favor of chasing B2B money. Their choice, their consequences.
- pixl97 6d agoInternet is a fad, it will implode at any moment.
- EA-3167 6d agoIn fact as a business opportunity it did just that because the massive investment in the mid-late 1990's was without anything like a connection to profitability or sustainable demand. It took years after that crash for the concept of e-commerce to begin both a recovery and evolution into what we see today. I expect something similar for AI. It's useful tech... just not very profitable tech, and certainly not to the tune of trillions of dollars worth of public demand. The promises of superintelligence, replacing everyone, and the rest of the hype will die with the companies who made the promises, but the tech will survive and thrive.
- pixl97 6d ago>The promises of superintelligence, replacing everyone, and the rest of the hype will die with the companies who made the promises The hype will die but there are many reasons why super intelligence and robots are a separate entity from said hype. Look, back a few decades and tell someone our gdp would be in the trillions and it's likely they'd have a hard time believing you. A huge portion of our products that we use day to day would be complete science fiction to them. All we're negotiating at this point is the timescale it will take.
- card_zero 6d agoUnpredictable things happen routinely, therefore these specific unpredictable things will happen?
- pixl97 6d agoThese things aren't really unpredictable. Work long enough on a robot with more dexterity and you will get just that. The timetable on when it happens is a bit more up in the air, economic downturns and wars can have huge impacts on it. But in my mind robots and superintelligence are inevitable unless there is a massive setback in humanity before then. Nature already did it once. We're not inventing something totally new. Add in every new invention and bit of intelligence we build on and actualize pushes us that much closer to the goal. Information technology allows this to speed up even further with easy sharing of information and testing. Superintelligence is not like faster than light travel. We have many frameworks that show us FTL is impossible. I don't believe there is a single widely accepted framework that shows there is some limit to intelligence and we're near it. Intelligence isn't even a singular thing. My calculator is a super intelligent adder compared to me. It would seem highly improbable that somehow nature random walked into making brains the most efficient general intelligence device in all dimensions and scales.
- glub 6d agoNearly the entire reason we're in this mess is because RAM/SSD/HDD makers are terrified of AI bubble bursting. Long-term contracts, not building new fabs - they're in full on hedging mode right now.
- leoc 6d agoSeemingly the AI bulls are either not sufficiently optimistic, or not sufficiently wealthy(?!), to build new fabs as joint ventures with the manufacturers in which they agree to assume most of the downside risk?
- no-name-here 6d agoThey signed long term contracts for the hardware delivery over years. AI investment is approaching 1 trillion per year and expected to grow to well over 1 trillion per year. [1] Even over their many years, projects like the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, or the U.S. Interstate Highway System never added up to that. [2] Is your argument that there is insufficient AI spending at present as they aren’t also taking on building their own fabs? [1] https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/global-investment-in-ai-infrastructure.html https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/glob... [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/visualising-ai-spending-how-does-it-compare-with-historys-mega-projects https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/visualising-ai-spen...
- m4rtink 6d agoIf the long term contact are with any AI companies, then good luck getting anything back in bankrupcy proceedings!
- m4rtink 6d agoLooking forward to see them burn.
- ThrowawayR2 6d agoIf the AI bubble bursts, the DRAM manufacturers switch back to making conventional DRAM and pent-up business and consumer demand results in a surge of purchases, cushioning the fall considerably.
- EA-3167 5d agoLook into the time frames a bit more, this isn’t a switch they flip. If the bubble bursts today it will be years before those downstream effects add up.
- IshKebab 6d agoThat's never going to happen. By the time you can run current frontier models on your $10k desktop the frontier will have massively advanced and people will want those models instead.
- kingleopold 6d agoThis + your ROI in $10k device will be always lower than busy datacenter, its literally math. They sell free compute to others when you dont use it, you will never sell at that level or even you magically sell home compute, you will not compete at price
- leoc 6d agoThat greater efficiency only benefits the LLM SaaS providers as long as the hardware manufacturers, probably especially the VRAM manufacturers, remain supply constrained, since the high-efficiency users are the ones who can pay top dollar. But the hardware guys' dream is presumably to get parts into millions of laptops which remain on standby for 19 hours a day, not to bargain with SaaS providers who obsessively optimise their memory consumption.
- hypfer 6d agoI'm not sure if this prediction will hold true. We're not seeing the progress in those "frontier models" that we have previously seen. There's certainly still gas left in tank tank, but we're way into the diminishing returns by now. Cloud inference still beats hardware investments by orders of magnitude of course, but that's only if your data doesn't really matter to you.
- airspresso 6d agoWe are certainly not in the diminishing returns phase for LLM progress. No sign of that yet.
- hypfer 6d agoWell I mean if I wanted to be extra pedantic, I would argue that we've been in that phase since LLMs were first introduced. Before that, we had 0. After that, we had more than 1. A leap as far as that is hard to recreate. But that wasn't my point. That's just trolling. The actual point is that LLMs aren't gaining new capabilities anymore. They just get more reliable at the ones they already have; turning what was a coin flip to some higher probability. That's (intuitively speaking, not strictly mathematically speaking) kinda the mathematical definition of diminishing returns.
- konaraddi 6d agoThere will be demand for both
- consp 5d agoSome demand. The question is if the capacity will meet it, be under or be over.
- amelius 6d agoWhat if the AI companies start selling the hardware with their models? I.e., you get a locked down device with access to their AI and maybe a way to run third party apps. Of course the developers of those apps will have to pay a percentage of their revenue. Sound familiar?
- throwaway85825 6d agoMore likely they would sell a chip with the model etched in silicon for the dramatically higher token/s.
- amelius 6d agoA chip that can only be accessed through their software. With a monthly subscription fee, and other enshittification surprises.
- szatkus 6d agoMost likely those models would be extracted from the hardware in no time.
- amelius 6d agoI suspect no, because most of the tokens would be used for its internal reasoning loop, and a cheaper model could be used to obfuscate the output.
- nutjob2 6d agoNot until the industry gets severe indigestion, which doesn't seem that far off.
- mixedbit 6d agoDuring the Covid global chip shortage Intel announced new factories to address the production bottleneck, before the factories even started to be constructed, the shortage was long over and the projects were eventually canceled.