By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.
> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.
For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.
It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.
But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.
I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust)
You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production.
We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes.
But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success.
If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous.
If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating.
(Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.
And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.