The future is thin clients for everyone, requiring a minimal amount of RAM and storage because all they are is a glorified ChatGPT interface.

I honestly think it's not that simple.

The ones who spend billions on integrating public cloud LLM services are not the ones writing that function. They are managers who based on data pulled out of thin air say "your goal for this year is to increase productivity by X%. With AI, while staffing is going slightly down".

I have to watch AI generated avatars on the most boring topics imaginable, because the only "documentation" and link to actual answer is in a form of fake person talking. And this is encouraged!

Then the only measure of success is either AI services adoption (team count), or sales data.

That is the real tragedy and the real scale - big companies pushing (external!) AI services without even proof that it justifies the cost alone. Smooth talking around any other metric (or the lack of it).

And what's wrong with not wanting to write functions yourself? It is a perfectly reasonable thing, and in some cases (ex: crypto), rolling your own is strongly discouraged. That's the reason why libraries exist, you don't want to implement your own associative array every time your work needs it do you?

As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If someone else's code does the job better then yours, that's the code you should use, you are not trying to be original, you are trying to make a working product. There is the problem of intellectual property laws, but it is narrower than plagiarism. For instance, writing an open source drop-in replacement of some proprietary software is common practice, it is legal and often celebrated as long as it doesn't contain the original software code, in art, it would be plagiarism.

Copyright laundering is a problem though, and AI is very resource intensive for a result of dubious quality sometimes. But that just shows that it is not a good enough "plagiarism machine", not that using a "plagiarism machine" is wrong.

If AI continues at this trajectory, sure, likely to the picks and shovels.

If AI has a bubble burst, you could see a lot of used hardware flood the market and then companies like WD could have a hard time selling against their previous inventory.

They haven't forgotten, they've expressly decided to soft-pivot away from consumer GPUs. RTX 60x0 series is apparently coming in 2018… maybe. If the bubble has burst by then.

Regardless where demand comes from, it takes time to spin up a hard drive factory, and prices would have to rise enough that, as a producer, you would feel confident that a new hard drive factory will actually pay off. Conversely, if you feel that boom is irrational and temporary, as a producer you’d be quite wary of investing money in a new factory if there was a risk it would be producing into a glut in a few years.

Loved the reference. Probably from Margin Call[0]

0. https://youtu.be/fij_ixfjiZE

AI is going to be what fiber was to the dotcom bubble. Someone spend a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure, some of which is going to be incredibly useful, but sold for much less than it cost to build. Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber networks.

    Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber

It's hard to increase long-run production capacity for what seems to be clearly a short-term spike in datacenter buildout. Even if AI itself is not much of a bubble, at some point spending on new AI facilities has to subside.

Earlier gamers got punished by crypto and now they are being punished by AI.

No it’s not an easy fix. Manufacturers don’t have a good pulse on long term demand. The he capex to spin up a new manufacturing plant is significant. Especially with the recency of Covid where some folks did get caught with their pants down and over invested during the huge demand boom.

I don’t quite follow the narrative like yours about nation states and investors. There is certainly an industrial bubble going on and lots of startups getting massive amounts of capital but I here is a strong signal that a good part of this demand is here to stay.

This will be one of those scenarios where some companies will look brilliant and others foolish.

I think AI companies are involving these other industries so when the money runs out they will claim the whole thing is too big too fail.

  There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here.

No, I think it is real demand.

AI will cause shortages in everything from GPUs to CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, fiber, etc.

AI simply increases computer use by magnitudes. Now you can suddenly use Seedance 2.0 to make CGI that would have cost tens of millions 5 years ago for $5. Everyone is going to need more disk space to store all those video files. Someone in their basement can make a full length movie limited only by imagination. It's getting better quick.

AI agents also drastically increase storage demands. Imagine financial companies using AI agents to search, scrape, organize data on stocks that they wouldn't have been able to do prior. Suddenly, disk storage and CPUs are in high demand for tasks like these.

I think the demand for computer hardware and networking gear is real and is only the beginning.

As someone who is into AI, hardware, and investing, I've been investing in physical businesses based on the above hypothesis. The only durable moats will be compute, energy, and data.

It includes all forms of storage except for USB devices, GPUs and high end CPUs. The latter you can still get but you're going to have some severe sticker shock.

I read it as both, but UK suppliers have stock of various SATA HDDs available in large and small sizes. It's hard to say if prices will rocket or availability decline, or both. I don't normally advocate panic-buying, but if it's needed now is the time. I have one NAS spare on hand, I don't want or need a drawer full of them, but it'll be a royal pain if I do and can't get parts.

All I know is I saw most of my go-to refurbished enterprise HDD’s 2-3x during Black Friday a few months ago compared to a year prior.

This particular news is for spinning drives, the other types we already had news about upcoming shortages earlier on.

It’s affecting both. HDD maybe slightly less/slower, but you’re paying significantly more than six months ago in any case.

Is there an industrial bubble? Probably.

> It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers.

That I think is a hard one to prove and is where folks are figuring it out. There is obvious continued demand and certainly a portion of it is from other startups spending money. I don’t think it’s obvious though where we are at.

Best Buy is actively selling 2x8gb sticks of DDR4 3200 for $80 a stick. I was floored. Ten bucks a gig, $160 for the pack.

We're fucking doomed.

That's actually a bargain, average market price (though highly volatile) is more than double that.

Hearing about their scrapping practises it might be that they are storing same data over and over and over again. And then yes, audio and video is likely something they are planning for or already gathering.

And if they produce lot of video, they might keep copies around.

All the latest general purpose models are multimodal (except DeepSeek I think). Transfer learning allows to improve results even after they exhausted all the text in the internet.

I am surprised by that too. I thought everyone moved to SDDs or NVMe ?

I was toying with getting a 2T HDD for a BSD system I have, I guess not now :)

Storing training data: for example, Anthropic bought millions of second hand books and scanned them:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthrop...

I storage and memory manufacturer don't respond with increasing supply. There might not be glut. Just postponed demand that will slowly get fulfilled over longer period. That is if we were in steady state.

On other hand if there is bigger economic turmoil that might mean that the postponed demand does not realise as there is no purchasing power...