Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

mashable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 328 posts

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#101

Post by xpe »

glimshe wrote: post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

> Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay.

This sounds like economic dogma based on pointing at some future equilibrium.

I like the saying that goes something like "life is what is happens when you are waiting for the future". In the same way, it seems to me that equilibrium is increasingly less common for many of us.

Markets are dynamic systems, and there are sub-fields of economics that recognize this. The message doesn't always get out unfortunately.

> But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies.

This feels like more dogma: find a convenient scape-goat: governments.

Time to wake up to what history has shown us! Markets naturally reflect boom and bust cycles, irrationality of people, and various other market failures. None of these are news to competent economists, by the way. Be careful from whence you get your economic "analysis".

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#103

Post by robinwhg »

It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers.

I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production, but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#104

Post by zozbot234 »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
ErneX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those drives are SATA inside the case.

That depends on the brand. The lower priced brands, yes, those can be SATA, the more vertically integrated companies also make custom PCBs that just have USB-C without any SATA interface exposed internally.

It's probably feasible to make a "mass storage USB in, SATA protocol out" smart adapter board.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#105

Post by digiown »

trueismywork wrote: post #61
smashface wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI continues at this trajectory, sure, likely to the picks and shovels. If AI has a bubble burst, you could see a lot of used hardware flood the market and then companies like WD could have a hard time selling against their previous inventory.

Given how hard AI is on I/O, while restarting if hardware might go second hand. I dont see hard drives go second hand. Most hardware that we get might be used beyond redeeming even at free price.

I don't think the HDDs are being used for any intensive loads. They have too much latency for most of that. It's probably just archival storage for their scraped content and generated slop.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#106

Post by xpe »

arbuge wrote: post #68

I console myself with knowledge of the economics maxim that every supply shortage is usually, eventually, followed by a supply glut. One can only hope that that's the principle at work here, anyway. It could also be a critically damped system for all I know. Unfortunately I studied control systems too...

People with a control theory background are welcome in economics; the field is more diverse than some would recognize. Certain professions and subfields are more open than others. There are plenty of economists who care about things like resilience and dampening shocks.

I would love if more non-traditional economists got involved in the public sphere by which I mean: writing about economic trends, public policy, regulation, rate-adjustment, etc.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#107

Post by danaris »

ido wrote: post #58
mrweasel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is going to be what fiber was to the dotcom bubble. Someone spend a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure, some of which is going to be incredibly useful, but sold for much less than it cost to build. Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber networks.

Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber The manfucaturing capacity expanded to meet the demand for new hardware doesn't (as much)

But if the demand drops for six months, the manufacturers are going to scale back production.

If it drops for a year, they're likely to start shedding capacity, one way or another.

This is not an equivalent situation. The vast, vast majority of what's being produced for this bubble is going to be waste once it pops.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#108

Post by mapt »

robinwhg wrote: post #103

It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers. I don't know if TSMC has any…

Investors love a monopoly, and establishing this required more than a trillion dollars of investment sustained over a couple decades.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#109

Post by shimman »

Ekaros wrote: post #90
markus_zhang wrote: post #69

Better stock up with used laptops. I'm going to buy another one this year. Those used ones usually don't last very long. What if in the near future it is simply too expensive to own "personal" computers? What if you can no longer buy used computers from official channels but have to find local shops or sharpen up on soldering skills and find parts from dumps? The big techs will conveniently "rent out" cloud computer…

I have heard that you can get used laptops. But they do not come with memory or SSD anymore... As even used components are now valuable enough to be removed and sold.

Damn really? One of my go to moves when helping small political campaigns is to buy like a 2015 MBP and turn it into a locally hosted server to run all their stuff on the cheap.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#110

Post by pjc50 »

aurareturn wrote: post #73
glimshe wrote: post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. No, I think it is real demand. AI will cause shortages in everything from GPUs to CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, fiber, etc because of real demand. The physical world can't keep up with AI progress. Hence, shortages. AI simply increases computer use by magnitudes. Now you can suddenly use Seedance 2.0 to make CGI that would have cost tens of millions…

> The only durable moats will be compute, energy, and data

"Compute" is capital investment; normal and comprehensible, but on a huge scale.

"Data" is .. stolen? That feels like a problem which has been dodged but will not remain solved forever, as everyone goes shields-up against the scrapers.

"Energy" was a serious global problem before AI. All economic growth is traded off against future global temperature increases to some extent, but this is even more acute in this electricity-intensive industry. How many degrees of temperature increase is worth one .. whatever the unit of AI gain-of-function is?

Post reply on HN