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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

#31

Post by baq »

mrweasel wrote: post #25
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…

AI is going to be what fiber was to the dotcom bubble. Someone spend a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure, some of which is going to be incredibly useful, but sold for much less than it cost to build. Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber networks.

current shortages are exactly the result of fabs not wanting to commit extra capex due to overbuild risk and inference demand seems to be growing 10x yoy; you've famously got 8 year old TPUs at google at 100% load.

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

#32

Post by mrweasel »

smashface wrote: post #10
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #4

Are these the picks and shovels? Is the profitability of these electronics manufacturers more likely than the companies that are buying up all their future inventory?

If AI continues at this trajectory, sure, likely to the picks and shovels. If AI has a bubble burst, you could see a lot of used hardware flood the market and then companies like WD could have a hard time selling against their previous inventory.

The problem is more likely that companies like WD doesn't know if this will be a bubble or not. Currently they can milk the market by raising their prices and just rely on their current production facilities, maybe expand a little. If there's going to be crash, then it's better to have raised the price, even if just temporarily, rather than being left standing with excessive production capacity.

If it's long term, it would be better to be the front runner on additional capacity, but that's assuming continuous growth. If it all comes down, or even just plateaus, it's better to simply raise prices.

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

#33

Post by kotaKat »

xienze wrote: post #23

I built a new server this time last year. My board does 6 channel RAM so I bought 6x32GB ECC DDR5. $160 a stick at the time. Just for grins I looked up the same product number at the same supplier I originally bought from. $1300 apiece. One of the VMs running on that server is TrueNAS, with 4 20TB WD Red Pros. God help me if I have to replace a drive.

Best Buy is actively selling 2x8gb sticks of DDR4 3200 for $80 a stick. I was floored. Ten bucks a gig, $160 for the pack.

We're fucking doomed.

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

#34

Post by XorNot »

anonymars wrote: post #27
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…

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...)

Somewhat ironically the AI boom means Nvidia would've easily made their money back on that investment though and probably even more thoroughly owned the GPGPU space.

But as it is it's not like they made any bad decisions either.

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

#35

Post by mcny »

Xunjin wrote: post #20
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…

Loved the reference. Probably from Margin Call[0] 0. https://youtu.be/fij_ixfjiZE

I like to imagine the reference in the movie margin call is that of a merry go round or a game of Musical chair. Like we are all on a ride, none of us are the operator, and all we can do is guess when the music will stop (and the ride ends).

The problem with this AI stuff is we don't know how much we will be willing to pay for it, as individuals, as businesses, as nations. I guess we just don't know how far this stuff will be useful. The reasons for the high valuation is, in my guess, that there is more value here than what we have tapped so far, right?

The revenues that nVidia has reported is based on what we hope we will achieve in the future so I guess the whole thing is speculation?

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

#37

Post by M95D »

antonyh wrote: post #21
jacquesm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It includes all forms of storage except for USB devices, GPUs and high end CPUs. The latter you can still get but you're going to have some severe sticker shock.

Maybe shucking USB HDDs is the short-term answer.

Is that still possible? Aren't they native USB with no adapter?

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

#38

Post by xiphias2 »

It's interesting to see here that spending is irrational, but actually even if AI improvements slow down it's more rational for companies to spend more and underutilize the machines than to underspend and get disrtupted.

On the otherhand lots of people here are even more uncomfortable of the other option, which is quite possible: AI software algorithms may scale better than the capacity of companies that make the hardware. Personally I think hardware is the harder to scale from the two and this is just the beginning.

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

#39

Post by XorNot »

Sharlin wrote: post #30
dClauzel wrote: post #2

Good luck to everyone. Home you made some reserve. Yes, AI is nice, but I also like to be able to buy some RAM and drives…

The future is thin clients for everyone, requiring a minimal amount of RAM and storage because all they are is a glorified ChatGPT interface.

It won't last. If the demand is sustained then new factories will open up and drive the price down.

More likely a couple of big financing wobbles lead to a fire sale.

It isn't practical for HDD supply to be wedged because in 5 years the disks start failing.

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