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

mashable.com

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

#111

Post by philjackson »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #13
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…

Regardless where demand comes from, it takes time to spin up a hard drive factory, and prices would have to rise enough that, as a producer, you would feel confident that a new hard drive factory will actually pay off. Conversely, if you feel that boom is irrational and temporary, as a producer you’d be quite wary of investing money in a new factory if there was a risk it would be producing into a glut in a few years…

> it takes time to spin up a hard drive factory

Very good.

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

#112

Post by pjc50 »

ghywertelling wrote: post #51
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…

Earlier gamers got punished by crypto and now they are being punished by AI.

"Punished" implies a moral valence to the whole thing which isn't there. It's not like the AI companies were aware of gamers and set out to do this. You simply got run over, like everyone else in front of the trillion dollar bulldozer.

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

#113

Post by bko »

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…

Higher price encourages more supply. Typically when you see a acute shortage, its quickly followed by a glut as supply starts coming online in an over correction.

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

#114

Post by Ekaros »

Sharlin wrote: post #30
dClauzel wrote: post #2

Good luck to everyone. Home you made some reserve. Yes, AI is nice, but I also like to be able to buy some RAM and drives…

The future is thin clients for everyone, requiring a minimal amount of RAM and storage because all they are is a glorified ChatGPT interface.

You know what is the sad part. I don't think software developers or LLMs know how or want anymore to make low resource consumption software that runs on a thin client. It will be some browser based thing capping to whatever memory is available on the system.

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

#115

Post by mbreese »

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 question isn’t if the demand is real or not (supplies are low, so demand must exist). The question is if the demand curve has permanently shifted, or is this a short-term issue. No one builds new capacity in response to short term changes, because you’ll have difficulty recouping the capital expense.

If AI will permanently cause an increase in hard drives over the current growth curve, then WD, et al will build new capacity, increasing supply (and reducing costs). But this really isn’t something that is known at this point.

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

#116

Post by xpe »

mapt wrote: post #108
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.

> Investors love a monopoly...

Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way. Underlying such a single point-of-failure is an implied but immense hope and thus pressure for stability. I wonder what the prediction markets saying about current levels of geopolitical stability in Taiwan?

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

#117

Post by shimman »

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…

It's only this way because the American ruling class would rather ship jobs overseas to increase their wealth than competently establish an industrial sector that would pay good wages to average people.

Turns out letting a bunch of MBAs plan your economy is extremely foolish.

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

#118

Post by aurareturn »

mbreese wrote: post #115
aurareturn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 question isn’t if the demand is real or not (supplies are low, so demand must exist). The question is if the demand curve has permanently shifted, or is this a short-term issue. No one builds new capacity in response to short term changes, because you’ll have difficulty recouping the capital expense. If AI will permanently cause an increase in hard drives over the current growth curve, then WD, et al will build n…

My post argues that the demand has permanently shifted.

By the way, plenty of people on HN and Reddit ask if the demand is real or not. They all think there's some collusion to keep the AI bubble going by all the companies. They don't believe AI is that useful today.

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

#120

Post by tomasphan »

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…

Non state of the art lithography is pretty much commoditized (DDR3 & DDR4) so we will always have compute, although slower.
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