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

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

#201

Post by zozbot234 »

bachmeier wrote: post #195
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…

Time for folks to familiarize themselves with Linux distros designed to run on older hardware. My 2009 laptop runs great, with the exception of the browser. Oh and the fact that 32-bit software is harder and harder to find.

A full-sized laptop from 2009 will probably boot a 64-bit distro, even Pentium M was no longer in use by then.

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

#202

Post by BoredPositron »

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…

The quote was from the screenwriter he never said it.

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

#203

Post by slashdev »

aurareturn wrote: post #93
appreciatorBus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll add that the GPU, CPU, storage, and RAM industries crashed in 2022 after a Covid-induced boom.[0] Everything was cheap. Samsung sold SSDs at a loss that year. TSMC and other suppliers did not invest as much in cap ex in 2022 and 2023 because of the crash. Parts of the shortage today can be blamed by those years. Of course ChatGPT also launched in late 2022 and the rest is history. [0]www.trendforce.com/presscent…

I bet the same thing happens when the AI bubble pops.

"but this time is different, it's not a bubble, there's real value there"

Economists use the term “bubble” to describe an asset price that has risen above the level justified by economic fundamentals, as measured by the discounted stream of expected future cash flows that will accrue to the owner of the asset.

I think there's little argument that is happening, the question is more about to what extent is it a bubble.

The entire global software industry is worth less than $1 trillion dollars. Or in other words smaller than the current valuation of just OpenAI + Anthropic.

Planned capital investment this year by the Magnificent 7 alone is $600B. More than 2/3 of the total global software industry. In one year. Good luck buying any computer hardware this year, there will be a shortage of everything, including electricity.

It's a bubble. But when does the music stop?

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

#204

Post by BearOso »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #183
BearOso wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

LLMs are considered Turing complete.

Only if you instantiate it once.

If you use it like an agent and stick it in a loop and run it until it achieves a specific outcome it's not.

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

#205

Post by BoredPositron »

aurareturn wrote: post #123
BearOso wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe LLMs can solve novel problems, maybe not. We don't know for sure. It's trending like it can. 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.

Every solution generated by an AI for a novel problem was ultimately rescinded. There is no trend, there is only hope.

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

#206

Post by throwworhtthrow »

runjake wrote: post #190
aurareturn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silicon Valley is arguing that TSMC isn't investing enough. They should be investing hundreds of billions to build fabs, like how big tech is investing in the AI buildout. $45 billion for new fabs is peanuts compared to Amazon's $200b and Google's $180b investment in 2026. Can't really blame TSMC though. It takes years for fabs to go from plan to first wafer. By the time new fabs go online, demand might not be there.…

According to Elon during his recent Dwarkesh podcast appearance[1], TSMC is limited by resource constraints (fab components, contractors, etc). His claim is that TSMC is building as fast as they can and they are unable to meet industry demand. Seems legit to me. Nonetheless, I think it's a solvable problem. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA

If this is actually true, I think you can find a more reliable source than Elon Musk.

I'm not saying you should never listen to a word he says. His actions shape the world after all, so it's important to understand how his words precede his behavior. But I'm baffled why anyone would take Elon at his word, or even slightly hedge their perception of reality based on Elon's claims of fact.

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

#207

Post by fwip »

randusername wrote: post #160
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…

I don't think phones are really any cheaper than the mini PCs that businesses can already buy. Which makes sense, because a phone has to include a battery, touch screen, and is under tighter space constraints.

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

#208

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> 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?

The premise here is that if we use more electricity then we burn more carbon. And the media hates AI, so if anybody restarts any coal-fired power plant to run a data center anywhere, that's the story. But then there's this:

https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/eia-99-of-new-us-capacity-in-...

Nobody actually wants coal because solar is cheaper.

And data centers are a pretty good combination for this because the biggest problem with solar and wind is what to do during multi-day periods of low generation, but data centers have backup generators and would be willing to turn them on whenever the cost of grid power is higher than the cost of operating them. Running some gas turbines for a week every two years in exchange for stabilizing the grid and being able to run on renewable power for the other 103 weeks is a pretty good outcome for everybody, not least because that amount of grid stabilization would exceed their consumption, i.e. allow more renewables to be added to the grid than they're using. If they can shed 1GW of load when a 2GW (long-term average) solar farm is generating at 50% of typical capacity for a week, you can add that 2GW of solar to the grid and remove 1GW of fossil fuels even while the data center is increasing consumption by 1GW.

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

#209

Post by voxl »

aurareturn wrote: post #123
BearOso wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe LLMs can solve novel problems, maybe not. We don't know for sure. It's trending like it can. 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.

There is zero evidence that LLMs can do anything novel without a human in the loop. At most LLM is a hammer. Not exactly useless by any stretch of the imagination, but yes you need a human to swing it.
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