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Comment by Kuyawa | Hacker News Reader

I firmly believe this shortage is artificially produced and I really hope chinese manufacturers flood the market and make memory as cheap as toilet paper

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It is not artificial constraint. The build out is titanic; the supply of AI compute is doubling every 6.8 months. To feed that much growth hyperscalers have to price everyone else out of the market.

To put the AI buildout in perspective, it exceeds the GDP percentage that was put into the railroads or interstate highway system.

And there were multiple railway buildout bubbles leading to stock market crashes...

It's only "artificial" in the sense that getting this much money on the AI companies that don't even make a profit is not normal.

It's actaully "super" in the sense super intelligence is causing the shortage

It's not artificial as in "RAM vendors lie about real demand and refuse to invest in more capacity".

There is definitely some exaggeration around timelines (2030 instead of 2027) and the industry has a cartel but most of it is real demand. From AI companies that don't have the money to pay for it and probably won't ever receive actual shipments but they locked down contracts ahead of time.

> I firmly believe this shortage is artificially produced and I really hope chinese manufacturers flood the market and make memory as cheap as toilet paper

I hope so too, but I'm afraid that if China ever blockades Taiwan, then current RAM/GPU prices will look like an incredible bargain.

My guess is it may happen after the election in November. Trump has everything tied up in a pointless war in Iran right now, so it would be a good time for China to make a move, before the 2028 election gives us a more competent government again.

>the 2028 election gives us a more competent government again.

Now that's a pretty brave assumption!

Anything would likely be an improvement over the current situation. Even electing a piece of silica (a literal rock) would be better than the malicious idiocy happening now.

I remember saying the same thing about W, years back.

I don't think that an abundance of any computing resource is a good thing. Cloud, storage, memory: this idea that you can always get lots of it leads to all sorts of undesirable outcomes.

What? All a shortage does is ensure those with deep pockets control the entire ecosystem. Bye bye personal computing. The people with money don’t want you to own anything, they’d rather you rent everything from them. How is that not an undesirable outcome?

What I was getting at was stuff like this:

- cheap memory: code is bloated and inefficient. Why do I need 2GB to fire up a text editor? Is that cross platform runtime really the best basis to run my app on? People need to feel the sting of a malloc saying no sometimes.

- cheap storage. It's so cheap that there is zero technical brake on storing everything. With the concomitant abuses of privacy. A widget website needs name, address, CC, not 134 pieces of information about my GPU and screen resolution along with my contacts list.

- cheap compute. we've all seen the Rube Goldberg Kubernetes/ factory contraption and it's only possible when the marginal cost of spinning up a new pod, sidecar, etc is minimal. When compute is cheap people outsource their architecture thinking to someone else's decisions.

- cheap network. Nothing new here: are apps sending a ton of gunk for no real purpose eg JS. Also related to compute complexity as systems span multiple nodes

Qualcomm CEO was talking demand for chips that can run a 100B param model on a phone.

There is a Q about how much RAM these phones will need and the average selling price.

People are seriously addicted to doom scrolling. But what are they willing to pay for a phone?

How so?

Price crashes, builders go bankrupt, price oscillates heavily, pace of improvement goes way down.

Honestly I think a slowdown in the "pace of improvement" might be positive. These days it feels like you can't catch your breath.

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