Are all these companies going to go bankrupt when the AI bubble pops and their products flood the market?
Western Digital runs out of HDD capacity: CEO says massive AI deals secured, price surges ahead
Submitted 2 weeks ago by ardi60@reddthat.com to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
rafoix@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
roguetrick@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They’d only go bankrupt if they were spending the capital to increase capacity and were left holding the bag. And nobody’s interested in doing that.
Stiggyman@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Issue is that the production is for server gear not consumer. So it’s U2 and other connectors rather than SATA.
Same goes for RAM it’s ECC and won’t work in normal consumer PCs (AMD has like unofficial support)
turboSnail@piefed.europe.pub 2 weeks ago
I guess I’ll have to buy one of those racks when the bubble pops. Just add an LED strip on the outside and a gaming GPU on the inside. Surely they support PCIe?
errer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oddly enough ECC used to be quite common for consumer hardware…I had an old Mac desktop in the late 90s/early 00s with ECC memory. But at some point it was decided that consumers don’t want to pay the extra $ for error-free RAM and mobos largely dropped support.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Eh, the market will adapt.
I’ve been looking at components on AliExpress. Even now, there’s lots of X99-based motherboards with LGA2011-3 sockets that can take both regular DDR4 and ECC DDR4.
But the descriptions are quite hard to understand, and they are apparently quite picky about which RAM will work with them.I could get a combo of that motherboard with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 CPUs (2.4GHz, 3.3GHz turbo, 28 cores, 56 threads in total) (hey, a dual CPU motherboard) for €120. And it’s got 8 RAM slots. So 32GB just with cheap 4GB sticks.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
So that’s why consumer drives and ram are not affected by the price rise! /s
1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
Unbuffered ECC DIMMs can be used as-is even on PCs not supporting ECC
Registered DIMMs can be unsoldered and the RAM chips reused in a pinch I suppose?
But reports of manufacturing capacity being moved to HBM will not benefit consumers if the bubble bursts.
Korkki@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
We might dine well on used datacenter hard drives in the coming years.
Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Oh when will China start making HDDs and SSDs and GPUs and CPUs
PLEASE China PLEASE flood the market with cheap, top shelf computer parts that will force Western corporations to lower their prices or go bankrupt when they don’t
nyan@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
They do make hardware in most of those categories, actually, but they don’t sell much of it direct to consumer in the West. And unfortunately, the way things are going, they’re going to be able to get better prices for it from the AI-entranced idiots too.
trougnouf@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I had an ExcelStor hard drive in the past and it was the most reliable drive I’ve ever had. I normally replace them when they died but that one never did, I just ended up retiring it when its capacity was no longer worth the electric cost to keep it running.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They‘ll just make it with secret phone-home data spying and backdoors for themselves.
balsoft@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Sooo, same as right now, but with way less possibility to be used against me? Sign me up!
Riverside@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
It seems to be that you’re mistaken, the NSA and Snowden aren’t Chinese, they’re from the USA
Aqarius@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well if the choice is between cheap spying hardware and expensive spying hardware…
MITM0@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also it is a bit easier to de-spyware chinese devices.
heiligerbimbam@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
fortnitefinn@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The boobs really sell it.
krimson@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Haha this is hilarious
edgyspazkid@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
XD
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
I uh…was not quite expecting that.
kescusay@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
A while back, I was thinking about upgrading my living room entertainment PC. It’s got a decent video card in it, but some of the other hardware is getting long in the tooth.
Now, my plan is to focus on software tweaks to squeeze the absolute best performance I can out of it, and keep the hardware as-is until it starts physically breaking down. And when that happens, I’ll find refurbished hardware to upgrade it with, rather than spending the exorbitant fees to buy anything new.
What mystifies me about all this is that it’s obvious what the end goal is: No more PCs, and everyone just rents dumb terminals connected to AI data centers that run everything and have all the compute power. The problem is that literally no one but AI companies want that. Not consumers, and not other companies that sell software and services to consumers.
When cars replaced carriages, it was because people actually wanted them. Cars had real-world benefits over horses. But this shit? No one wants it. Gamers want game performance you simply can’t get with streamed games. People who work with computers for a living don’t want their ability to do anything to vanish if their ISP has an outage.
Shit’s gonna get stupid, fast.
skip0110@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Its the “service economy.” Instead of making things, industry (in the US at least) is heavily skewed towards providing services (aka things you subscribe to or need to buy each time you use).
It does not benefit the individual.
Mac@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
They can service deez nutz
Bastards
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
They BADLY want to be able to monitor our every communication, because an authoritarian government that sees North Korea as a prime example, needs to be able to clamp down hard on any notion of dissent.
And we will have huge work camps all over America to send seditious traitors to, to be leased out as slaves to corporations, under the 13th Amendment. You love your precious Constitution, don’t you? You expect MAGA to abide by every word, don’t you? Well then you better love the 13th Amendment, too.
rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Businesses want AI because it solves what they perceive as a problem: how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour.
Remember: AI is meant for wealth to access labour without cost, not for labour to access wealth. It’s a golden gate meant to permanently separate the wealthy from what used to be the working class.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s awful.
I bought a second laptop for general use, because I wanted a Linux laptop and a gaming-dedicated laptop running Windows.
I got a very nice, used Acer for about $600 that runs everything I need AND functions well with a dual-boot, so I was thinking of selling my gaming laptop. Now? I’m holding onto it so I don’t have to get price gouged if my main computer fails.
Wild world we live in.
myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
This is the plan. They want us to rent virtual machines from them. No buy, only rent. You will own nothing, think of the shareholders and be happy, no….proud, you are here for their benefit.
piranhaconda@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
OnlyPhones is the future they want. Walled gardens and apps. Freedom and real compute power will be locked away in their servers. And the top of the line phones are already expensive enough that pretty much everyone that has one is on a payment plan for it
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
That argument always befuddled me. There will be a saturation point of AI data centers when there’s enough equipment already installed and ready to use by these over bloated behemoth corporations. Once that’s over or when the market hopefully pops, the demand for memory should have a steep decline. With their cash cow tapped out, WD and all the other memory manufacturers would then have to go back to consumers they previously fucked over to sell their new production stock. I doubt it’ll be at the prices we saw a year ago but once enough memory hits the consumer market for a while, prices should start to dip back down.
iSeth@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Regardless of whether the bubble bursts, the massive amount of compute in these data centers won’t go away. It will be up for rent when this AI training falls out of fashion.
Why would a chip maker try to predict the market when they can make contracts for years worth of production?
If the manufacturers never go back to producing the useful consumer hardware, we would be forced to rent this data center compute.
Smells like cloud gaming.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m getting distinct “fire sale” vibes from all of this.
ebolapie@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oh my god we’re having a FIRE ^^sale
Dead_or_Alive@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The AI bubble is starting to pop. All of these companies have made hardware and data center investments far beyond what is needed or can be sustained. The debt is piling up and they are scrambling to justify the immense build out. Musk allowing porn and CSAM on Grock for paid users , Chat GPT pushing commercials, Microslop putting copilot in everything and forcing adoption. Oracles server utilization remains low, Etc. etc.
They now need to show immense growth and adoption in order to keep getting loans or justify burning cash to their shareholders.
Chat GPT and Oracle will be the first to fall, then xAI etc. Google and Microslop have other revenue sources that can weather the storm. But they won’t continue their massive investments.
Zetta@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
I’m pretty sure the massive buildout is for training new models. Their justification is they need more compute to get the superhuman level intelligence AIs that they have been claiming. So if that pans out their probably gonna be fine, but seems unlikely that’ll pan out how they want it to
piranhaconda@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
It’s the grift that keeps on grifting. How long can it keep going
cideyav138@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Haven’t seen anyone else ask this question, so I will. What on earth does an AI data center need all of this storage for?
The only significant use of AI is for text generation to my knowledge. Video gen is the only thing that takes up any significant space, and current models can only produce short video clips before they go off the rails. Also, very few people are interested in video gen. It’s an expensive toy without much real world utility. Is there something I’m missing? Are these AI companies planning to scrape every video off the net and store them independently for training?
Booking out this much HDD capacity would only make sense to me if 5 TikTok or YouTube competitors all came onto the scene at once. Not AI. AI needs fast, parallelized compute and high performance memory to hold the models it’s running. Text slop requires negligible storage.
maturelemontree@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It may be a little tinfoil hat like, but you cannot convince me that these companies are shoving AI in literally everything, buying all the hardware in existence, and building data centets on land that no one wants them at, just to “make a better ai for the consumer.” I believe this is an attempt at hardcore tracking and surveillence.
Zink@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
I think it’s a combination of that and the worry that there will be one winning ubercorp that practically merges with the US Government.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
Justifier@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Thr most refined usage, and money dumped sector of Ai by far is image recognition. Its where all thr money from Amazon and others has been dumped (Flock Surveillance, Amazon Ring, FedEx Trucks, Wal~Mart and your choice of store)
Surveillance, ALPR, Facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. It takes a massive amount of data
Go see how much space you need if you want to secure data from 10,000 cameras at 480p/720p/1080p for a few weeks, let alone a year or two
cideyav138@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Gotcha, wasn’t thinking about surveillance. We are the social credit system – China ain’t got shit on our authoritarian future.
Bullerfar@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They want to log ALL user data in the world. Every convo you ever had with the ai, in text or audio, images video, etc.
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Caching. I’m guessing they download the internet to large storage arrays and then run neural network learning on them. Its probable they download all videos too and transcribe them later. So its not so much used for hosting content, but for teaching models.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
These psychopaths are absolutely giddy about taking all our jobs away.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
While simultaneously acting like a bunch of whiny little crybabies about falling birth rates.
ghosthacked@lemmy.wtf 2 weeks ago
Do your part to make ai unviable by salting their ai algos. Feed them false info & make junk ai requests.
The sooner this bubble pops, the better
Kissaki@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I’m not sure feeding more misinformation to our systems and society is that good of an idea. I don’t think it’d be an effective influencing strategy either.
Taldan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
In the short-term, it isn’t. Long-term, I think it’s much better
It will force AI companies to find ways to combat bad data and intentional poisoning efforts. I’d much rather anti-AI activists be the ones abusing AI than for it to be a Russian, Chinese, or American APT
The second effect is that it would make more people aware of how often AI is wrong. Way too many people blindly accept AI results
Also, you can always poison AI to fit your own world view. Teach it that the Epstein files should be thoroughly investigated, with perpetrators prosecuted, or something
michael_palmer@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
Onion Prices Reach Record Highs; Data Center Security Guards Secure Soup Contracts for Three Years
Onion prices have surged to unprecedented levels, setting new records in markets across the country. Traders report that supply shortages, rising transportation costs, and increased demand have all contributed to the sharp increase, placing pressure on households and restaurants alike.
In response to the soaring prices, security guards working at several major data centers have taken an unusual step to manage costs. The guards have collectively signed contracts to secure soup supplies for the next three years, aiming to stabilize their food expenses amid ongoing market volatility.
Industry analysts say the spike in onion prices reflects broader trends in food inflation, which continues to impact consumers and businesses. Meanwhile, the long-term soup contracts highlight how workers are adapting creatively to rising living costs.
Market observers will be watching closely to see whether onion prices stabilize in the coming months or continue their upward trajectory.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Won’t bother me, I despise onions. Cry, onion lovers, cry.
oh_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
All these companies suck.
sturmblast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Fuck AI
Wooki@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sounds convenient after not long ago they cut production on the back of slowing demand.
“AI” more like thinly veiled business cartel on the back of low to no chances of law enforcement and regulation.
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I have the HDDs, but I can’t get a nas at a decent price at all. These fucking billionaires have to go or they will happily end us all before talking their claws out
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Find some random used office PC and strap the drives inside. Install treunas and let it ride.
Tyrq@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I just ordered some cheap stuff from Ali Express to build one out instead, 150 instead of like 500. I figured I’d rather have new old parts than used old parts, even if the specs are lower, I guess we’ll see how it pans out, at least it’ll probably have a better uptime than my old hobbling pc.
Thanks for the heads up on truenas though, wasn’t sure what I’d need to use, cheers for that!
fierysparrow89@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
WD should run their business as they like. Given the simmering ai crash I’d make sure to get payed upfront. As for the other vendors, this is their chance to pick up market share.
Taldan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How many consumers have brand loyalty for harddrives? To me, they’re effectively a commodity. I’ll go with the one that has the best benchmark results for the size and price
Kissaki@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
I’ve always bought Western Digital. The one time I bought Seagate I eventually had data loss. Stuck to WD ever since.
sefra1@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Let’s just pray my anime harddrive doesn’t fail meanwhile…
themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Here is my post from months ago:
Kushan@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
HDD prices have been creeping up for a while now. I noticed this as I was looking to add more storage to my server, checked prices late last year, figured I’d hold off a bit longer, checked again a few weeks ago and they were much higher across the board. Also a lot less stock for higher capacities. Took the plunge, bought enough storage to get me through the next few years.
Glad I did as the drives I bought have continued going up in price. This article just confirms it for me.
MITM0@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
& Chinese Hardwareanufactures are rubbing their hands waiting for the opportunity
silverneedle@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Spiralling
Zen_Shinobi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Who is still using HDD these days?
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
HDD is still good for backups.
Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How much for 100TB of drives $1500 How much for 100TB of NVME $10,000
Yes I still use hard drives in my threadripper servers and NAS.
TheOneCurly@feddit.online 2 weeks ago
My 20TB zfs mirrored NAS. I’m not buying 40TB of ssds in this economy.
Godric@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Image