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As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

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Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#291

Post by nyc_data_geek1 »

palmotea wrote: post #139
torginus wrote: post #133

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.

Nothing ever lives up to the hype, that's why it's called hype.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#292

Post by walterbell »

doom2 wrote: post #274
EZ-E wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end, with the current market prices, chips factories and data centers are being built all over with the assumption of exponential demand growth. When the excitement and demand for AI cools, we will enjoy the additional capacity and better prices. Also see: fiber bandwidth post 2000. Capital poured in, overbuilding happened, prices collapsed after the crash.

Has work begun on increasing RAM production capacity? My understanding is that these companies are specifically _not_ increasing capacity yet while they wait to see if the bubble bursts or not.

They decreased 2025 production, to increase memory prices, profits and their stock prices,https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46419776

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#293

Post by eb0la »

I believe we're in the middle of a "perfect storm" and AI is not the only one to blame:

- Right now A LOT of PCs are getting out of date because Windows 11 wants some new hardware that's missing in older PCs. - At the same time, smartphones were starting to use and need more memory. - Modern cars (mostly electric) have much more electronics inside than older ones... they're now distributed systems with several CPUs working together along a bus. - The cloud needs to upgrade and newer servers have much more memory than older ones with almost the same foorprint (wich means you need to lease less datacenter space). - And GPUs for AI are in demand and need RAM.

But only AI is to blame although we're living in a perfect storm for RAM demand.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#294

Post by Inityx »

fartfeatures wrote: post #208
arnaudsm wrote: post #190

[deleted]

This take is pure Luddite nonsense. AI "lowering labor value while boosting capital" ignores centuries of automation: productivity gains cut costs, expand markets, create new jobs, and raise real wages despite short-term disruption. Steam engines, electricity, computers displaced workers but spawned far more opportunities through new industries and cheaper goods. Same pattern now. The "jobless masses stuck with 1GB p…

> Compute keeps getting vastly cheaper and more capable; AI speeds that up.

???

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#295

Post by blitzar »

palmotea wrote: post #139
torginus wrote: post #133

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.

> If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man.

This hype scenario would be the biggest bust of all for Ai. Without jobs or money then there is nobody to pay Ai to do all the things that it can do, it the power and compute it needs to function will be worth $0.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#297

Post by appreciatorBus »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #63
appreciatorBus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s that easy to make infinite money, maybe the govt should could just do that too so we’d have enough for healthcare and other programs?

The government can't, and doesn't, make infinite money. Govt debt can't grow to infinity either, so if revenue is not increased, unpredictable and unpleasant events will follow. However, the taxation issue is so hopelessly misrepresented and misunderstood that I'm not going to discuss it here.

That’s not what I’m saying. If the implication is that hard drives of all things are being manipulated to make unlimited amounts of money, then the government could just do the same thing and earn that money for the public instead.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#298

Post by eb0la »

alecco wrote: post #262

For a while CPUs kept getting significantly faster every year. Then ram kept getting bigger. Then NVMe came along and brought 200-1000x IOPS. So writing optimized software was niche and overshadowed by the huge gains of hardware. People and corporations didn't care. They preferred fast feature delivery. Even when optimizing techniques like multi-tenant servers, we ended up having heavy containers wasting RAM and reso…

It is true that (most) people don't care, but... ... if you're beign charged by RAM (CPU is essentially free) ... ... AND you develop an application that's also your source of income ... THEN memory usage matters.

At least the first years.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#299

Post by appreciatorBus »

bigbadfeline wrote: post #120
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this is an economics-free take if I've ever heard one. And calling it scalping feels laughable. There are multiple RAM providers. Datacenters, many competing ones, are gobbling up RAM because there is currently a huge demand. And, unlike actual ticket scalpers, datacenters perform a very valuable service beyond just reselling the RAM. After all, end users could buy up RAM and GPUs themselves and build their own…

> This is simply run-of-the-mill supply and demand. That's definitely NOT run-of-the-mill demand because it comes from companies buying hardware at operating loss , which can only be recouped by scalping higher prices at the expense of a starved market. Demand funded by circular financial agreements and off-the-book debt isn't "run-of-the-mill" by any stretch.

What happens if some clever HN programmer develops a new algorithm such that you can do training and inference with 1/10 or even 1/100 of the GPU horsepower?

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#300

Post by intrasight »

xadhominemx wrote: post #289
impossiblefork wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It going to be misleading to look at the fraction and I think it's misleading to only look at PE investors. It's more important to look at the fraction of demand for homes that are on the market. Investors bought 1/3 of the US homes sold in 2023. This is, I think, quite alarming, especially since a small amount of extra demand can have a large effect on prices.

That 1/3rd is almost all small time flippers who renovate properties before resale.

Good point. Flippers shouldn't be included in that stat. But I doubt that it's "almost all".

The statistic that matters is the ratio of owner occupied to rented single family homes.

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