Yeah that’s happened before, with both memory and hard drives. A flood in Thailand caused HDD shortages and price spikes for a year or two around 2012, and there was a similar situation with DRAM some years earlier. There have also been GPU and SSD shortages due to cryptocurrency idiots. This may just be more of the same.
In capitalism, if the demand is outstripping supply then eventually higher prices will command greater investment and the eventual return to normalcy of the supply vs demand curve. In theory it is more of the same, but how prolonged it will be will be dependent on when the AI supply/demand curve achieves normalcy.
Some of the shortages have been due to supply interruptions, like the hard drive factory getting flooded, or similarly with a DRAM factory catching on fire. I don’t know what happened after the Chia lunacy (Chia was a crypto currency that consumed vast amounts of SSD space and destroyed the SSD’s through extreme write wear) but prices did normalize after a while. I know that Chia was the final straw that got Hetzner to ban crypto mining on its hardware outright. Previously, it was forbidden on VPS’s but allowed on dedicated servers. Anyway it caused a temporary shortage of both SSD and hard drives.
Unfortunately besides chips, another huge input to this AI crap is electric power, which is coming mostly from expanding fossil fuel consumption and thus increasing planetary heating. Economists’ intersecting curves are of no help with that.
I hate this stupid gold rush at the expense of the consumer.
Who else would it be at the expense of?
The wealthy haven’t finished funneling everything to themselves.
I bought a a 2Tb NVme last April and it has has since doubled in price. Crazy times man. Guess I’m sitting on my rig for the foreseeable.
Same, bought 2x22TB enterprise HDDs for $260 each in May of last year. Even recertified ones now go for $650. Praying they don’t die
so buy RAM and SSDs now.
Ah, so, marketing, not news…
I mean, both times in two years ive bought storage/ram the prices have increased afterwards. So depends on how much you need it/can wait.
Brings me back to the 90’s, remember the RAM dealers at the computer swap meets/parts conventions?
