I’m getting distinct “fire sale” vibes from all of this.
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.
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.
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.
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
Gotcha, wasn’t thinking about surveillance. We are the social credit system – China ain’t got shit on our authoritarian future.
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
They‘ll just make it with secret phone-home spying and backdoors.
It seems to be that you’re mistaken, the NSA and Snowden aren’t Chinese, they’re from the USA
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
OnlyPhones is the future they want. Walled gardens and highly addictive apps and subscriptions and micro transactions (aka gambling). 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
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.
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
It’s the grift that keeps on grifting. How long can it keep going
Broadly speaking, yes, and it’ll keep going until they run out of money. However, I think there is a very small chance that one of the companies is able to make a breakthrough probably with a different kind of architecture than our current LLMs that does get us to models that make genuine discoveries and breakthroughs.
Very unlikely though.
At which point the government will step in because they will have become too big to fail
Partially correct. They’ll step in because they signed contracts and have moved AI under the umbrella of National Security. Brockman donated $25m back in September. Trump signed Project Genesis in November. So all these hardware companies feel pretty good because it’ll be backed by taxpayers.
Spiralling
The boobs really sell it.
Those are some big ear muffs
Absolutely massive
They’re huuuge… trunks of land!
Haha this is hilarious
XD
So basically the consumer market is screwed until the AI bubble bursts and manufacturers (GPUs, RAM, HDDs, etc.) can rebalance their production lines back to the pre-AI division of enterprise vs consumer product.
As workers, we are majorly screwed no matter what happens. Either AI/Robotics takes off, and creates a permanent 50% unemployment class, which MAGA will solve by exchanging basic subsistence needs like shelter and water in work camps, where we will be leased out to corporations as slaves, under the 13th Amendment. Also a good place for any dissenters, journalists, attorneys and judges who won’t go along, etc.
Or maybe the bubble will pop, and we’ll have a repeat of 2008, except 100 times worse.
No matter what happens, the citizens are going to take it in shorts.
Do you think that this time the lesson will stick? Will we stop lionizing rich, lazy, smug fucks who’s protein would be more useful as fertilizer for our crops?
We have to MAKE it stick. We are at a point of no return. We have to take back control of our country, and stop trusting politicians to do right by us. They have proven over and over that they won’t.
And a major part of it will be recalibrating our relationship with the wealthy. They think their money has bought them control of anything they want, and we have to HARSHLY disabuse them of that notion. We control and regulate THEM, not the other way around. They will do what’s best for this nation, or their fortunes will be re-allocated to better uses.
We can’t kick the can down the road any further. Time to crush the can.
It sounds like we are in agreement that examples must be made. A hot stove is a powerful teacher, and seeing a conspecific or two get their fingers burned to a cinder will serve that cause well.
That’s about the size of things, yes.
In 2030 you will own nothing.
And you will be happy.
I wish I believed the happy part
By 2030 my game “Backups” will in playing time surpass my remaining life expectancy lol
I have a very long breath to dive this through.
No kidding, my 24tb hdd entirely full of GoG launchers has everything handled.
Heh, that applies to most of my idiot peers but not me!
I see the writing on the wall and I’m fighting back every way I can.
I am sure you will be able to subscribe to use a share along with hundreds of other people for 1 computer at $19.99 a month going forward.
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.
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.
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.
They can service deez nutz
Bastards
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.
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.
These psychopaths are absolutely giddy about taking all our jobs away.
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 taking their claws out
Find some random used office PC and strap the drives inside. Install treunas and let it ride.
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!
Are all these companies going to go bankrupt when the AI bubble pops and their products flood the market?
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.
We might dine well on used datacenter hard drives in the coming years.
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)
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.
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.
Edit: reading up on it the G5 (which I had) required ECC memory
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?
So that’s why consumer drives and ram are not affected by the price rise! /s
They’re saying that even when it bursts and there’s all these components laying around, they’ll still be useless for consumers.
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.
Won’t bother me, I despise onions. Cry, onion lovers, cry.
All these companies suck.
