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

151–160 of 328 posts

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

#151

Post by pier25 »

peyton wrote: post #80
pier25 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI companies are involving these other industries so when the money runs out they will claim the whole thing is too big too fail.

By buying flash and thus shifting demand to HDD? How does that work?

The article doesn't mention flash or HDD. It seems that all storage by WD is already sold.

My point is that directly or indirectly all hardware companies depend on memory and storage. If AI companies fall this could have repercussions to the whole industry.

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

#152

Post by infecto »

londons_explore wrote: post #83
infecto wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s not an easy fix. Manufacturers don’t have a good pulse on long term demand. The he capex to spin up a new manufacturing plant is significant. Especially with the recency of Covid where some folks did get caught with their pants down and over invested during the huge demand boom. I don’t quite follow the narrative like yours about nation states and investors. There is certainly an industrial bubble going on an…

Smart manufacturers will sell 'hard drive futures'. Ie. "Give us $100/drive now for 100k drives for delivery in march 2028". These contracts are then transferrable. The manufacturer can start work on a factory knowing they'll get paid to produce the drives. If the AI boom comes to an end, the manufacturer is still going to get paid for their factory, and if the AI company wants to recoup costs they could try to sell…

Can you provide some solid examples of companies doing this in an industry with high capex? Yes futures exist but largely in commodity businesses. Because what you described sounds more like pre-purchase agreements which already exist. To have a futures market you would need investors and a product that is more of a commodity and not something highly engineered.

You are also forgetting that the payback period on a plant is not a single year, it will be over many years and most likely no buyer is wanting to arrange purchasing that far out.

I don’t see how what you described sounds is set in reality even for “smart manufacturers”.

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

#153

Post by pixl97 »

mbreese wrote: post #145
aurareturn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My post argues that the demand has permanently shifted The time horizon for this is murky at best. This is something you think, but can’t know. But, you’re putting money behind it, so if you’re right, you’ll make a good profit! But for the larger companies (like WD), over building capacity can be a big problem. They can’t plan factory expansion based on what might be a short term bubble. That’s how companies go out…

Us being in the same pool as AI is one of the potential risks pointed out by AI safety experts.

To use an analogy, imagine you're a small fluffy mammal that lives in fertile soils in open plains. Suddenly a bunch of humans show up with plows and till you and your environment under to grow crops.

Maybe the humans suddenly won't need crops any longer and you'll get your territory back. But if that doesn't happen and a paradigm change occurred you're in trouble.

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

#154

Post by misnome »

pjc50 wrote: post #110
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 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 increase…

> How many degrees of temperature increase is worth one .. whatever the unit of AI gain-of-function is?

Billionaire. And they are definitely willing to make the trade.

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

#155

Post by zozbot234 »

infecto wrote: post #152
londons_explore wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart manufacturers will sell 'hard drive futures'. Ie. "Give us $100/drive now for 100k drives for delivery in march 2028". These contracts are then transferrable. The manufacturer can start work on a factory knowing they'll get paid to produce the drives. If the AI boom comes to an end, the manufacturer is still going to get paid for their factory, and if the AI company wants to recoup costs they could try to sell…

Can you provide some solid examples of companies doing this in an industry with high capex? Yes futures exist but largely in commodity businesses. Because what you described sounds more like pre-purchase agreements which already exist. To have a futures market you would need investors and a product that is more of a commodity and not something highly engineered. You are also forgetting that the payback period on a pl…

There are futures markets for DRAM. Somewhat secretive (hard to find reliable price quotes) but they exist.

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

#156

Post by pixl97 »

anthk wrote: post #79
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…

AI's output is not reproducible. It's a disaster.

If we want reproducible output we already have conventional software. Stop using a hammer on screws.

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

#157

Post by jccc »

literalAardvark wrote: post #150
jccc wrote: post #147

Great. I’ve just returned a WD drive to Amazon after it arrived crushed in a torn-open paper bag. The replacement arrived also in a paper bag and went straight back, this time for a refund. I guess I should have kept that one and hoped for the best. Good alternatives? I’ve only recently been enlightened on how profoundly sh__ty SSD is for long-term storage and I have a whole lot of images my parents took traveling th…

I'm sure Amazon isn't the only shop that delivers to your area

The premise of this news is that prices are going to climb and availability is going to drop.

And I’m not keen on having anyone ship me one of these anymore.

Walmart sells what appears to be an older version of the drive and I might have to cross my fingers and just get one of those.

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

#158

Post by pixl97 »

bko wrote: post #113
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.

These factories take years to make and massive amounts of money. That and there are so few manufacturers now they are far more likely to collude

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

#159

Post by SoftTalker »

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.

In a lot of cases, owners remove the storage not because it has any value but rather they don't want to risk making a mistake letting a device go that still has data on it.

Also pulling and shredding hard drives is cheaper than paying someone to run DBAN or equivalent (which can take many hours to complete on a large drive), and there's no easy way to securely erase an SSD if it wasn't encrypted from the beginning.

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

#160

Post by randusername »

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 think about this too. There are several headwinds. Rent-seeking and collapse of economies of scale in the consumer sector for sure, but also I feel like we've basically peaked in hardware's ability to meet routine needs.

Once the phone makers realize that they can sell phones and docking stations to businesses because 90% of knowledge work seems to happen in a web browser through one SaaS or other I think personal computers will be cooked.

Post reply on HN