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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

#71

Post by zozbot234 »

aurareturn wrote: post #63
mrweasel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying that data center buildouts can't overshoot demand but AI and compute is different than fiber buildout. The more compute you have, the smarter the AI. You can use the compute to let the AI think longer (maybe hours/days/weeks) on a solution. You can run multiple AI agents simultaneously and have them work together or check each other's work. You can train and inference better models with more compute. S…

You can't really use compute more because power is already the bottleneck. Datacenter buildouts are now being measured in GW which tells you everything you need to know. Newer hardware will be a lot more power-efficient but also highly scarce for that reason.

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

#72

Post by armada651 »

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.

Even if the AI bubble bursts, having successfully cornered the compute market they can just go rent seeking instead by renting out cloud workstations, given that they've made the hardware to build a workstation yourself unaffordable.

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

#73

Post by aurareturn »

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…

  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 5 years ago for $5.[0] Everyone is going to need more disk space to store all those video files. Someone in their basement can make a full length movie limited only by imagination. The output quality keeps getting better quicker.

AI agents also drastically increase storage demands. Imagine financial companies using AI agents to search, scrape, organize data on stocks that they wouldn't have been able to do prior. Suddenly, disk storage and CPUs are in high demand for tasks like these.

I think the demand for computer hardware and networking gear is real and is only the beginning.

As someone who is into AI, hardware, and investing, I've been investing in physical businesses based on the above hypothesis. The only durable moats will be compute, energy, and data.

[0]https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedance2_0

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

#74

Post by pixelesque »

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...

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

#75

Post by infecto »

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…

Is there an industrial bubble? Probably.

> It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers.

That I think is a hard one to prove and is where folks are figuring it out. There is obvious continued demand and certainly a portion of it is from other startups spending money. I don’t think it’s obvious though where we are at.

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

#77

Post by Gud »

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’d rather prefer that the average Joe has a good entertainment system than our corporate overlords has a good surveillance system.

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

#78

Post by azan_ »

aurareturn wrote: post #73
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…

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…

I wonder if I'm alone in being optimistic about this. I believe that the gigantic inflow of money into hardware will lead to large increase in production capabilities, accelerated progress and perhaps even new, better architectures.

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

#79

Post by anthk »

aurareturn wrote: post #73
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…

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.

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

#80

Post by peyton »

pier25 wrote: post #70
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…

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?
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