This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
so much wrong with this title.
It's nice how AI datacenters step by step swallow virtually all available hardware resources to provide digital services to users who won't be able to use those services due to the lack of available hardware.
I doubt offering AI services to the public is their goal.
You can use them fine. In fact, you'll have to on your new Android phone which has no opt out.
The one I just bought came with 3 of the fucking things installed on it.
Next up, torches and pitchforks will ve sold out. And AI won't exist.
I get paid on the 27th, I need two more 8TB drives to complete my NAS, my local retailer had 50+ in stock earlier this week, and now the drives are no longer even listed.
Fuck sake...
I bought 2 8TB drives last week and had to check if they were still in stock at the same retailer and they are, but the price have gone up with 23%...
I do see that another retailer has drives in stock, but at about 40-50% more than I paid back in October
I just bought a few WD drives direct, but their web site has a problem with validating virtual credit card numbers. I'm the few days it took to resolve it the price went up. Fortunately since I had the support ticket I was able to get refunded the difference.
The irony is as they bid up the price of all the hardware, they are probably making their AI platforms more likely to fail due to being more expensive than their value.
We can only hope that their businesses crash hard before any of these deals come to fruition and then when the hardware has nowhere to go we can all "buy the dip" so to speak.
To be clear, I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware, but hopefully it all crashing down will help get more people into self-hosting and working on community resources and networks instead of having everything live in the cloud.
I'm currently hosting everything on old desktop PCs and SBCs but fuck it, I'll swipe some closeout hardware and upgrade to a proper server rack.
In a similar boat, I've thought about that but if I ever upgraded to a stronger real centralized PC I'd have to do a bunch of Docker setup and if anything breaks my whole system would go down. As it is, with piecemeal shitass laptops each running individual services I get lots of redundancy!
Definitely same.
I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware
it actually won't be, at least not for the hard drives. the prevailing strategy for quite some time now is to just use the cheapest available disks and deal with the failures on the software level. those disks will ultimately fail anyway and the increased price for some super-duper enterprise reliability server disk is not really worth it.
Western Digital chief Tiang Yew Tan told analysts "We're pretty much sold out for calendar '26. We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers."
the dow is 50k and 37% of the market is made up of those seven
freaking financial human centipede
I can't wait for it to crash and burn, this bubble is getting so ridiculous.
🎈📌
that crash and burn will be the onus of the consumer not being able to consume.
we will lose access to free range computing and have to live with asking AI for permission to use the computing power and network resources to play a game or pay our bills online. And paytoll for that permission.
that will be the crash and burn victims here.
It needs to crash. If it doesn't crash soon, things will only get worse and worse for consumers. We're already over the edge of the cliff (imo), it's just a matter of how far we have to fall now. If it crashes hard enough, we won't have to live with "asking AI for permission to use the computing platform". By the way, an LLM isn't really capable of that at the moment, and the sooner it crashes, the less likely anything like that will happen.
These companies are publicly traded...
The people who run/own the AI companies would have been complete idiots to not invest in the hardware companies they were going to make these purchases from before making those purchases.
But 100 million in Seagate stock, then announce you just signed a contract buying up supply.
Your company may overpay, but you personally just made a shit ton of money. Which is the why you want your company to succeed
As a bonus, the news that you're overpaying to buy up all the hard drives, doesn't hurt your company it helps it.
There's no way to monetize it anyways, the product is the stock price. And this move makes the company seem confident, which raises stock price.
That's not even getting into the long term problem that even if AI fails, were seeing a huge migration in computing power from individuals to private corporations. That's a big deal even if AI dies tomorrow. And they have a lot of motivation to never let us get it back.
This is illegal but I'm sure it happens all the time.
Yeah, that's how politicians get the insider tips, it's bribes to not go after the person who gave them the tip.
If enough of the right people make enough money, then everything about it becomes legal, or at worse a fine that's less than the profits made.
I'm highly suspect this happens at the same time that Microsoft is demanding you upgrade your PCs to run their shitty software. and discontinuing Windows 10
They need to roll that back.
They want us to rent or compute from the clouds so they can watch each and everything we do.
Fuck AI
I recently checked on the price of the used 12TB server drive I bought a couple years ago. It was 80 then. It's 260 now. Same seller.
Bought a 20 TB external for ~$270 a few months ago. It's now $400:
1TB SSD I bought at the end of 2024 for $47 is $142 now
12TB HDDs were $104 a piece at the same time and are now $300 each.
Good idea. I just looked at a drive I bought six months ago and it's up 40% or so. Wish I'd have got two now.
Three months ago I put two 20TB hard drives in my cart for $350 each. This week I had to pull the trigger on them and they were $420 each
I will absolutely remember the companies that are saying “fuck the consumer” when I go to purchase anything going forward.
Honestly which companies does that leave?
Great point.
So with all the news on hardware shortages...someone is building skynet..and we just don't know about it.
What do you think all those data centers are for?
Less skynet and more a surveillance state thats gonna put England and even CCP to shame.
They need the hard drives because they're storing everything about us. Every time we drive by a camera, gps paths of our cell phones constant travel, every bank transaction including small purchases, every social media comment, page we view from WiFi or cellphone, all our connections to everyone else, tags for various groups.
Not even just the people we know we know, they'll know who's usually next to us in traffic on commutes and when, who makes our sandwich from the deli we go to every other Tuesday, what cops would be most likely to respond to a call to our house at a certain time...
Like, "skynet" is useful because everyone knows the term.
The real danger is what humans will do with access to that much information on everyone, and what a normal human would do to/for a stranger to protect all their darkest secrets.
Imagine if tech was 20 years ahead right now with trump in office, do you think someone like him would hesitate to start wide scale blackmail?
You think they're above telling a couple thousand people in highly targeted districts that they had to vote a certain a way or else?
It's not the AI we need to be scared of, it's the data.
It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.
That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.
If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can't can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.
That's literally the plot of the last two Mission Impossible movies.
It doesn't matter who has it, it's the one ring.
It's sheer existence is too dangerous to be allowed. But everyone focuses on what they could do with the power and think they'll be able to keep it.
That's why there's such pushback against opposition to datacenters, it's not just the money from the stocks, everyone pictures themselves as the only ones who gets to abuse the tech once it's built.
We do know about it. Most of the big name ai services are all public about working for government enforcement agencies. Palantir, Flock, Boston Dynamics, Tesla xAI, etc
let’s hope it comes crashing down in their face soon enough
Buy used ETA: and prevent waste
I meant from individuals, not corporations with a profitable refurbishing outfit. e.g.: eBay, thrift shops, the swap shop at your local dump (if you're lucky to have one), yard sales, etc.
One of my favorite things in life is rescuing hardware from the landfill, or bringing a relative's dusty old machine back to life. There are still loads of people out there who have never opened a PC case before, and think the whole machine is a loss just because it won't boot, or is "old".
Everyone IS so there’s a run on those also.
Wild that people were down voting you. Hard drives can last decades and are replaced from enterprise servers long before they're close to failing.
Especially with lowered use compared to a server, you won't see much functional difference between brand new consumer grade and used server grade.
Pretty sure caches and everything are better on used server grade still anyways.
I downvoted because look at serverpartdeals, the stock is horrific and what little is in stock is absurdly expensive
Yeah I'd imagine you'd have trouble finding a good deal there. I've had way more luck getting drives from eBay, thrift shops, yard sales and the local dump.
Also by convincing everyone I know to just give me their old stuff that they think is no longer useful. They don't want it taking up space anyway, and I get to harvest the useful bits and add them to my frankensteined home lab, then responsibly dispose of the rest. There have also been several machines I've acquired this way that I've repaired/made whole again, then provided to those who need them.
For me hard drives could potentially be bought second hand. However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it. Not because of the quality but because what was in it. Every time I get a refurb drive I have the bad habit to check what was the previous data if readable. One day I am sure I will get a nasty surprise...
However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it.
It's honestly not even worth trying to use the right terminology these days...
Every seller/manufacturer uses slightly different definitions.
So to clarify, what's good is:
A product that was sent back to manufacturer and "manufacturer refurbished" meaning that common fail points were inspected and repaired even if a failure would be emmenient but it's still working
Pretty much anything else, would be bad.
An example of what is bad is:
"Amazon/ebay refurbished" where someone may have wiped the dust off and possibly checked to see if it turned on.
Especially for hard drives, the refurbishing is built into the purchase contract of the new drives. And since the purchaser and manufacturer both understand the refresh is proactive and the old drives still have life in them, it knocks off a percentage on the new drives and that's where we can find deals.
I think I've got a 1TB that's ~20 years old I got that way. It's still technically in my main PC, but at this point it's an unimportant archive drive that just doesn't get read or wrote very often.
I've just literally never had a HDD or SD die tho. I don't know why people act like they're disposable parts of a PC still.
My definition of refurb is anyone that actually has a store and only deals with this stuff. Examples are western digital themselves or Seagate, or shops like true base
