Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#51

Post by GoofGarage » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:07 PM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #4

Shortage of ram and ssds, and soon, cpus. Motherboards aren’t selling because theres no point buying a motherboard if you can’t by the ram or ssd it needs. It’s brutal. I’ve just built a workstation with DDR4 and two-gen old cpu. I paid more for the ddr4 than it originally cost, four years ago. The same amount of ram for the latest motherboard would have been 10x ($10,000). So used DDR4 has gone through the roof, whi…

15 months ago I saw writing on the wall on several fronts. I suggested my community commit to their buys/builds ASAP and be forward-looking, before things changed.

My high-end HEDT would now be +$2300 to build mostly due to memory and SSD pricing. 96GB of memory going from $430 -> $1800 is wild. One community member literally wouldn’t be able to buy their Mac Mini configuration anymore, plus the self-upgrade SSD would be price hiked.

Where I blanche most is my storage server running TrueNAS. Built it 3.5 years ago, future-proofing in mind. Strong SSD cache layer, plus two spare HDDs as spares. It wasn’t cheap then, but I think between disks, storage, ECC memory, etc. it’s +$7000 now to rebuild it again, +$9000-$10000 on last generation hardware.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#52

Post by jeremyjh » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

overgard wrote: post #36

I know it's going to be extremely painful, but the sooner this ridiculous unsustainable AI bubble pops the better off we'll be. The more it inflates the more collateral damage it will cause, and we're probably already looking at 2008 levels of financial chaos.

What’s the feedback loop that leads to a total financial collapse? This looks much more like dotcom bubble. Everyone knows where the exposure is.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#53

Post by wtetzner » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

lifestyleguru wrote: post #26

xg15 wrote: post #16

Waiting for the future where the only computing devices you can buy as a consumer are locked-down phones and PCs are simply not available anymore...

This looks like a consumer choice and producers are following up with the demand.

Given that the AI companies are still operating at a loss and running on investor money, I'm not sure it's actually driven by consumer choice.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#54

Post by sokoloff » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

xbmcuser wrote: post #3

10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to actually reach on parity with node size. And sadly it looks like I was correct in my prediction.

After the recent run-up, where are prices on a per-performance basis? Back to 2019?

Computers were incredibly more expensive when I was growing up. People bought them anyway.

Is a computer that lasts 5-8 really productive years (and is still serviceable for another 5-7) and costs $1500 really a deal-breaker just because it was $1000 and on sale for $850 a year ago? Even if it doubled again, it still doesn’t price normal people out, IMO.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#55

Post by himata4113 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

I was looking into self-hosting deekseek v4 pro since frankly cache reads are an absolute scam and they're 90% of the cost, but then I looked at the ROI and it will never pay off fast enough because the hardware will become obsolete faster even if you were running 10 token generation streams 24/7.

The napkin math resulted that renting is around 27 times cheaper than owning (not including power). I think we're really screwed when it comes to having owned access to AI unless intel comes out swinging with a c series card that has 128gb vram so we can run them in a 4x128gb configuration, but seems unlikely since nvidia has a large share in them.

This was calculated expecting around 30tok/s, of course you can get 2-5tok/s much much cheaper, but it's unusable for my workflow.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#56

Post by dmos62 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

cryo32 wrote: post #49

palmotea wrote: post #28

Maybe with AI we can finally kill user-owned computing, and make almost everyone renters. It's really wrong that the common people have access to things like PCs. It leaves a lot of money on the table the corporations can extract, and makes control much harder. PCs should cost at least as much as a car, so only the right people can afford them. Own nothing and be happy.

Sarcasm aside, yep. There will be three classes: the owned, the owners and the unownable. I aim to be unownable.

How will you do that?

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#57

Post by ahartmetz » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

2ndorderthought wrote: post #37

ahartmetz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At current prices, Chinese companies could even produce everything possible (~anything but current gen CPUs and GPUs) on slightly older nodes and make a stonking profit while lowering market prices.

It would unfortunately be considered contraband in the US or tariffed 500%

If only the rest of the world could buy it, it would probably work almost as well (edit: to lower prices in the US). Besides, I'm in the rest of the world ;)

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#58

Post by vkou » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

ButyTh0 wrote: post #10

tetris11 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an active attack on the Hobbyist space. Qualcomm buying Arduino solidified this idea in my head. They literally want us to own nothing.

Because they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them. The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis. Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth. "Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!" Our generati…

Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, the depths of the sea, the void of space, the atom. We were taming diseases and found a way to end hunger. We started building thinking machines. We were playing with the fire of the gods. Science was working miracles on the daily.

It still is, but nobody gives a shit anymore, we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now.

Now we are just playing with fire.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#59

Post by hx8 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content.

I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and individuals are either pushed towards closed hardware like Playstation, MacBooks, and Android devices or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.

Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

#60

Post by psadauskas » Thu, May 07, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

therepanic wrote: post #50

cryo32 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcasm aside, yep. There will be three classes: the owned, the owners and the unownable. I aim to be unownable.

There will be two classes: those who are part of the perpetual underclass and those who are not. And 98 percent of the population will be part of it.

There are _already_ two classes:

Those who earn their living from their labor, and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.