Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.

Building these factories goes way beyond "nontrivial". We may see a few come online in a couple of years though, but time will tell if the extra capacity alleviates the crunch.

A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.

It is the law of inertia, it applies to many more situations than we think. Markets is one of the, especially large-scale ones.

Why isn't magic just doing the magic things the capitalists always tell us is magic?

Because the manufacturers of storage (and RAM) consider it to be an AI bubble, too. The surge in demand is a short burst, not a sustained one. Hence it makes no sense to throw a whole lot of ressources into scaling up production, when the demand won't be there anymore in 1-2 years when the factories will be ready.

Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line, you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.

Because:

1. Factories take time to build.

2. Building factories requires capital to be invested now.

3. The return-on-capital will only be obtained in the next n years.

4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped.

Free markets, yes

Production was close to maximum anyway because of existing demand and how expensive new fabs are to bring up. The boom in AI use wasn't sufficiently planned for as it wasn't expected at the scale we are seeing, so to scale up means building more fabs - a long and expensive task. The situation is not helped by one of the AI companies successfully negotiating huge deals for a year worth of production with the two biggest providers at the same time and keeping it secret enough that neither bumped up prices in the deal as a result of knowing what the play was.

Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards

Three years seems ridiculously low lifetime - I'd hope that was covered by warranty.

also bought a handful of 14 to 16tb drives. They sold for such a low price last year I thought it can't be wrong to grab them.

It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.

Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?

I have a home array too, though based on 4Tb drives (6x, two lots of RAID10, one 3x4T one 3x6T, linked as an LVM volume as I extended it by adding the second array some time ago).

I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they all work when I do finally get around to it…

I believe many sellers an eBay are illegally manipulating the market, and eBay is tacitly helping them by ignoring and removing feedback.

For example this seller: https://www.ebay.com/str/disctechllc

“Accidentally miss-priced” a bunch of drives, and then instead of canceling the orders, refunded everyone, but still shipped packages: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/enterprise...

I believe they intentionally did this, causing people huge import fees in some cases, in order to not remove the “26” sold on their listings that are now astronomically priced: https://ebay.us/m/mGRdiT

far be it for me to question your prophetic capacities. i wonder, do you have any historical examples or logic-based arguments that our doom of nigh?

A bit tangential: it’s narratives like this which can create sudden crashes on the stock market.

Just opened this year, apparently: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

I would think if you're a developing country looking to build some domestic semiconductor manufacturing expertise, it'd probably be best to start with something on the easier side. Something with closer to well-known and standard tech that can still be sold on the open market.