https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

In one of the last GPU booms I sold some ancient video card (recovered from a PC they were literally going to put in the trash) for $50.

And it wasn’t because it was special for running vintage games. The people that usually went for 1st rate gpus went to 2nd rate. Pushing the 2nd rate buyers to 3rd rate, creating a market for my 4th rate gpu.

But there have been plenty of articles over the last decade saying that it was done around 2015 or so.

The other way I look at this is that these companies have been collecting an insane amount of wealth and value over the last 2-3 decades, are finally in a situation where they feel threatened, and are willing to spend to survive. They have previously never felt this existential threat before. It's basically bidding wars on houses in San Francisco, but with all the wealthiest companies in the world.

overproduction means unsold units which is very bad, you pay a cost for every unsold unit

underproduction means internal processes are strained, customers are angry, but a higher price per a unit... can you increase the price by more than you are underproducing?

Doubtful. A shortage is normally a scary prospect for a vendor. It means that buyers want to pay more, but something is getting in the way of the seller accepting that higher price. Satisfying market demand is the only way to maximize profitability.

Why do you think companies would prefer to make less profit here?

Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.

I guess, you offered the news hoping prices will fall... In terms of real economic analysis there's a lot to say here but let me point at only one of the many entry points of the rabbit hole:

"Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Microsoft and all other AI wannabes are hoarding GPUs and thus RAM, they hope to sell them to you for a price of subscription which doesn't change the fact of speculative hoarding and trust-like behavior against the public.

The hoarding and inflation economy we live in is a weapon against the public, at the moment, there's no visible force that isn't laboring diligently on the enhancement of that weapon, so the timeline of change is likely to stretch somewhere between far in the future to infinity... just hoping otherwise is futile.

If you pay attention, you won't fail to notice the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines. In other words, you pay the price, they own the benefits. And if the propaganda fails, they can always use some more general inflation to do the same, as it's being done elsewhere in the economy.

As I said, this is just scratching the surface, there's a lot more which cannot fit in a single comment.

Edit: actually not. The parent comment was edited after mine, to include a link to MS inadvertently admitting to the hoarding of GPUs and RAM.

Who is the "we" in this sentence? The ultra-rich that don't want to pay white collar workers to build software?

The advantages of LLMs are tiny for software engineers (you might be more productive, you don't get paid more) and the downsides are bad to life-altering (you get to review AI slop all day, you lose your job).