121–130 of 328 posts
What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?
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…
Maybe now we will start to see the "optical" CPUs start to be a thing. Or the 3D disk storage,;or other ground breaking technology.
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I'm not saying that data center buildouts can't overshoot demand but AI and compute is different than fiber buildout. The more compute you have, the smarter the AI. You can use the compute to let the AI think longer (maybe hours/days/weeks) on a solution. You can run multiple AI agents simultaneously and have them work together or check each other's work. You can train and inference better models with more compute. S…
Did you pay attention in computer science classes? There are problems you can't simply brute-force. You can throw all the computing power you want at them, but they won't terminate before the heat-death of the universe. An LLM can only output a convolution of its data set. That's its plateau. It can't solve problems, it can only output an existing solution. Compute power can make it faster to narrow down to that exis…
There are still plenty of problems that having more tokens would allow them to be solved, and solved faster, better. There is no absolutely no way we've already met AI compute demands for the problems that LLMs can solve today.
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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.
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They haven't forgotten, they've expressly decided to soft-pivot away from consumer GPUs. RTX 60x0 series is apparently coming in 2018… (oops, 2028. No time travel involved. Probably). If the bubble has burst by then.
> RTX 60x0 series is apparently coming in 2018 That's either a typo, or NVidia has achieved some previously unheard of levels of innovation.
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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.
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If I remember during a previous GPU shortage (crypto?), Nvidia (and/or TSMC?) basically knew the music would stop and didn't want to be caught with its pants down after making the significant investments necessary to increase production Not to mention that without enough competition, you can just raise prices, which, uh (gestures at Nvidia GPU price trends...)
I believe the TSMC CEO said that in a recent interview. They're aware that their now biggest customer Nvidia has a less broad product portfolio than Apple and the high volumes they buy propably won't last. It's too much of a risk to plan more Fabs based on that.
Last week: “TSMC's board approves $45 billion spending package on new fabs”
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
Presumably they're also looking to increase production capacity as fast as possible - within the year? I'd have thought HDDs aren't at the top of the list for AI requirements, are other component manufacturers struggling even more to meet demand?
If we weren’t talking about AI, was there another high demand sector / customer for spinning platters?
And their margins get fat now that supply is relatively constant but AI demand has saturated their current production numbers.
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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…
This fact never ceases to amaze me. It's so cool how relentlessly AI is pushing the horizons of our current hardware! Maybe now we will start to see the "optical" CPUs start to be a thing. Or the 3D disk storage,;or other ground breaking technology.
I bought 6x refurbished ultrastars for ~$100/ea Black Friday 2024. They were over $200/ea 2025. Samsung T7 (and shield) SSD’s have 2x-3x. Can’t get 1TB for less than like $180 right now. It’s ridiculous