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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

#211

Post by Ajedi32 »

yndoendo wrote: post #198

The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages. Market says the more you buy the better pricing you get. Once you start capturing large market share of the product, the price should go up and not down; exponentially. Example, a person that owns 10 houses means that they are restricting the ability of others to own a single home. By increasing the cost of excessive product ownership ... i…

The laws of supply and demand are not optional.

If you try to use government to force reality to conform to your idea of how things should work you're just going to get 1,000 companies buying 10,000 hard disks each rather than 10 companies buying 1,000,000 each. And if you try to outlaw that somehow then the market will just route around your new scheme in another way, creating even more unintended consequences in the process.

If you must meddle, you're much better off working with market forces rather than trying to fight against them.

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

#212

Post by skeeter2020 »

alexpotato wrote: post #82
anonymars wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

Similar thing happened with mask manufacturers during COVID. They didn't spin up additional mask production b/c they knew the pandemic would eventually pass. They learned this lesson from SARS. Not maxing out production during spikes (or seasonality) in demand is a key tenet of being a "rational economic actor".

too bad the bicycle industry didn't learn this. They acted like COVID was the new-normal, and it has resulted in many companies disappearing when they learned the hard way that demand for bikes in a pandemic is neither sutainable nor normal.

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

#213

Post by thisisit »

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…

This is what a business cycle looks like.

Seeing the first mover succeed, every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to emulate. It distorts the price because people would pay premium for everything. Then there is surplus supply and no takers. People are caught with their pants down and things go for cheap.

This repeats ad nauseum. Whether it was building ISPs during early 2000s or the abundance of streaming service where every media company wanted one. Just because the corporate overlord doesn't want to look foolish for not following a trend.

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

#214

Post by SietrixDev »

kshacker wrote: post #85
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…

Are these factories already running 24/7 that labor can't be added to make more without adding capital infra? And if they were running 24/7, maybe setting up another factory or line will avoid some of the 24/7 scheduling.

As far as I know, the lithography machines are indeed running 24/7 (barring servicing).

https://www.asml.com/en/products/customer-support

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

#215

Post by cmiles8 »

doom2 wrote: post #141
cmiles8 wrote: post #17

This is all basically a textbook example of irrational market decisions. There’s clearly a bubble and not enough money coming in to pay for the AI bonanza. It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers. That’s just masked at the moment because of all the capital being pumped in to cover for the lack of actual revenue to pay for everything. The structural mismatch at the…

> in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market COVID was six years ago. In that time, GPU prices haven't gone down (and really have only increased). Count me skeptical that there will be a flood of cheap components.

That was largely due to the crypto mining bubble popping just as the AI bubble was getting started

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

#216

Post by pixl97 »

bit1993 wrote: post #162
xpe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way. Interesting. Capitalism is often touted to be more decentralized than socialism, but this is an example of how it can centralize.

Socialism is always talked out how it works out in practice, capitalism is talked about how it works out in theory

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

#217

Post by e145bc455f1 »

yndoendo wrote: post #198

The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages. Market says the more you buy the better pricing you get. Once you start capturing large market share of the product, the price should go up and not down; exponentially. Example, a person that owns 10 houses means that they are restricting the ability of others to own a single home. By increasing the cost of excessive product ownership ... i…

>The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages.

I buy one hard disk, AI company busy 40% of global supply. Me not buying that one hard disk is not going to change anything.

>According to Western Digital, thanks to a surge in demand from its enterprise customers, the consumer market now accounts for just 5 percent of the company's revenue.

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

#218

Post by TiredOfLife »

pixelesque wrote: post #74
55555 wrote: post #49

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?

Storing training data: for example, Anthropic bought millions of second hand books and scanned them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

All of Annas archive can be put on 40 drives

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

#219

Post by 1shooner »

high_na_euv wrote: post #56
ghywertelling wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So what? Why gamers must be the most important group?

I think they're just a proxy/alias for 'state-of-the-art personal computing'.

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

#220

Post by spwa4 »

slashdev wrote: post #203
aurareturn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it's a bubble that big it's

1) the only reason any part of the economy is growing at all

2) the only reason US banks aren't bankrupt due to the commercial real estate debacle they got themselves into

In other words, if this is a bubble, if this pops, we're back in the 2008 situation. Where banks will go bankrupt one after the other like dominoes (in the sense that this amount is large enough that large banks will fail their financial obligations). And you can argue as much as you want based on "real" valuation metrics but none of your investments, not even cash dollars or even gold, will come out of that one intact.

Fortunately, there's the counterargument: you know what else is higher than ever? The revenue produced by the software industry. To the point that at the moment you can say, as crazy as it sounds: if revenue of the big software firms keeps growing the way it IS currently growing, this is not enough investment.

In case you're wondering what exactly that means, not enough investment. Think of it like this: you're selling shoes. If you invest too little in new shoes (or whatever resources you need to sell shoes), then you will have to tell customers coming in "sorry, all out of shoes, take your money elsewhere". Currently it's not enough investment. If this growth rate keeps up for 1.5 years, Amazon will have to close the store to anyone who wants more machines, in fact they are turning away large customers right now at Amazon, Google and Microsoft. That's where the "spend more now" madness is coming from. Is it unjustified?

Well, it appears not.

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