Comment by pmdr
5 days ago
So, like, we were already pretty much priced out of higher-end graphic cards, and now it's happening to RAM. All this while jobs are disappearing, layoffs are ongoing and CEOs are touting AI's 'capabilities' left and right.
Next is probably CPUs, even if AIs don't use them that much, manufactures will shift production to something more profitable, then gouge prices so that only enterprises will pay for them.
What's next? Electricity?
Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world? /rant
Maybe that is the answer to how things are supposed to work if AI replaces everyone and no one can afford to buy their stuff.
Things being too cheap allows money to pool at the bottom in little people's hands in the forms of things like "their homes" and "their computers" and "their cars".
You don't really want billions in computing hardware (say) being stashed down there in inefficient, illiquid physical form, you want it in a datacentre where it can be leveraged, traded, used as security, etc. If it has to be physically held down there, ideally it should be expensive, leased and have a short lifespan. The higher echelons seem apparently to think they can drive economic activity by cycling money at a higher level amongst themselves rather than looping in actual people.
This exact price jump seems largely like a shock rather then a slow squeeze, but I think seeing some kind of reversal of the unique 20th century "life gets better/cheaper/easier every generation".
I very much disagree that consumers holding more hardware capabilities than they need is a bad thing. Replace computing hardware with mechanical tools, because they are basically tools, and consider if consumers be better off if wrenches and saw blades and machine tools were held more exclusively by business and large corporations. Would corporations use them more often? Probably. And yet it seems pretty clear that it would hurt the capabilities of regular people to not be able to fix things themselves or innovate outside of a corporate owned lab.
To me the #1 most important factor in a maintaining a prosperous and modern society is common access to tools by the masses, and computing hardware is just the latest set of tools.
> And yet it seems pretty clear that it would hurt the capabilities of regular people to not be able to fix things themselves
Yes, that's the point. People fixing things themselves doesn't make the line go up, therefore it will be made harder.
I think you missed some sarcasm there.
Until I got the last part, I actually thought you were being serious.
The important thing is that the people who actually do matter here are being very serious.
And I assume some of them read these threads, so my advice to them would be to remember that the bunker air vents will probably be the main weak point.
> Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world?
In the hands of the owners of the AI, as a direct consequence of the economic system. It was never going to play out any other way.
Yeah, I'm always confused why programmers seem to like this technology given the vast negative consequences it will likely have for us. The upsides on the other hand seem to be the most insignificant things.
> upsides on the other hand seem to be the most insignificant things
An abundance of intelligence on Earth with all its spoils: new medicine, energy, materials, technologies and new understandings and breakthroughs - these seem quite significant to me.
12 replies →
Ding ding ding. What a surprise that a system designed not for human flourishing but pure profit would actually deliver massive profit with no regard for human flourishing.
Humanity will have to adopt new human-focused modes of living and organizing society, or else. And climate change is coming along to make sure the owning class can't ignore this fact any longer.
> a system designed not for human flourishing but pure profit
But please, don't be coy: tell us about that other system that is designed for "human flourishing" - we're dying to learn about it.
Because I grew up under communism and I lived its miserable failures: the non-profit system didn't even manage to feed, cloth or warm/cool us.
> new human-focused modes of living and organizing society
Oh, these sounds sooo promising. Please do tell us: would you by any chance be willing to use force to "convince" the laggards of the benefits of switching? What if some refuse to believe your gospel? Will you turn to draconic laws and regulations?
13 replies →
> In the hands of the owners of the AI
With a hundred bucks and a Robinhood account, you too can be part of this greedy, evil and mysterious "owners of AI" class and (maybe) some day enjoy the promised spoils.
Oh the wonders of Capitalism, the economic system offering unequal abundance to everyone caring to take part... Where are the other, much touted systems, masters at spreading misery equally?
> What's next? Electricity?
Yes. My electricity prices jumped 50% in 3 years.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mikesimoncasey_our-team-at-re...?
How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?
Also, consumer prices _have_ risen (mine included), but it's not clear that this is only because AI. While EV charging is not at the scale of all data centers combined, it seems to grow even faster than the datacenter's consumption, and is expected to eclipse the latter around 2030. Maybe sooner due to missing solar incentives.
Also, to rant on: According to [1], an average Gemini query costs about 0.01 cents (Figure 2 - say 6000 queries per kWh at 60 cents/kWh, which is probably more than the industrial consumers pay). The same paper says one other providers is not off by that much. I dare say that at least for me, I definitely save a lot of time and effort with these queries than I'd traditionally have to (go to library, manually find sources on the web, etc), so arguably, responsibly used, AI is really quite environmentally friendly.
Finally: Large data centers and their load is actually a bit fungible, so they can be used to stabilize the grid, as described in [2].
I would think it would be best if there were more transparency on where the costs come from and how they can be externalized fairly. To give one instance, Tesla could easily [3] change their software to monitor global grid status and adjust charging rates. Did it happen ? Not that I know. That could have a huge effect on grid stability. With PowerShare, I understand that vehicles can also send energy back to power the house - hence, also offload the grid.
[1] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/measuring_the_envi...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358514...
[3] that's most likely a wild exaggeration
> How much is due to long overdue infrastructure upgrades and greed by providers, vs the cost of energy?
This only makes sense if you ignore profits. We've been paying the bills since before this was "overdue"; for instance i am still paying a storm recovery surcharge on my electric bill from before i ever moved to this state. At the point where a "temporary infrastructure surcharge for repairs" becomes a line item on their profit statement, that's where i start to get real annoyed.
Our electric company has 287,000 customers and has a market cap of >$800,000,000
what percentage of that eight tenths of a billion in market cap came from nickel and diming me?
* note: nickel and dime was established as "an insignificant amount of money" in the 1890s, where sirloin, 20% fat was $0.20 a pound. That's $13.50 now (local); chuck $0.10 and $19 now. So somewhere between 67 and 180 times less buying power from a nickel and dime, now. Also that means that, y'know, my surcharges being $15-$30 a month is historically "nickels and dimes"
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112019293742&s...
In my personal case, it was cost of energy due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggering a stop on buying cheap gas from them. Infrastructure upgrades are also being done, costing tens of millions per year because the grid can't handle the sudden increase in renewable energy generation and electrification (to ironically move away from dependency on gas).
I mean part of me thinks it's a necessary evil because we relied too much on Russian gas in the first place. But that's because we extracted most of our own gas already (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field), which that article lists as one of the factors in the Dutch welfare state being a thing - it and smaller fields out at sea contributed over 400 billion to the Dutch economy since the 1950's.
Rooftop solar doesn’t get more expensive over time.
Roofs do, though.
In the share prices. Hope you're rich, because that's the only thing the economy cares about.
Many apps support buying fractional shares. You don't have to be rich to buy shares in public companies.
It's only meaningful if you have enough disposable income to invest that it eventually (and I don't mean in 50 years) makes a dent against your living expenses.
If you make $4k/mo and rent is $3k, it's pretty silly to state that it's a meaningful thing for someone to scrimp and invest $100/mo into a brokerage account.
They definitely should do this, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on their life for decades at best. Save for a decade to get $12k in your brokerage account, say it doubles to $24k. If you then decide you can get a generous 5% withdrawal rate you are talking $600/yr against rent that is now probably $3500/mo or more. Plus you're killing your compounding.
It's good to have so emergencies don't sink you - but it's really an annoying talking point I hear a lot lately. Eye rolling when you are telling someone struggling this sort of thing.
It really only makes a major impact if you can dump large amounts of cash into an account early in life - or if you run into a windfall.
12 replies →
It's not like the individual share price of e.g. VTI or FZROX is all that high to begin with.
> What's next? Electricity?
That and water. Electricity: Google made a post about scaling k8s to 135.000 nodes yesterday, mentioning how each node has multiple GPUs taking up 2700 watts max.
Water, well this is a personal beef, but Microsoft built a datacenter which used potable / drinking water for backup cooling, using up millions of liters during a warm summer. They treat the water and dump it in the river again. This was in 2021, I can imagine it's only gotten worse again: https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/industrial-water/microsof...
Is any datacenter's water use significant compared to other industrial installations? According to that article, all datacenters in North Holland use 550 Ml/yr. North Holland has 2.95M residents [0], who use 129 l/person-day [1], 47 Kl/person-year, 139,000 Ml/year for the whole region. So the data centers use an estimated 0.4% of the region's water. Data centers use about 3% of the Netherlands' electricity.
Why do you think this is a lot of water? What are the alternatives to pulling from the local water utility and are those alternatives preferable?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Holland
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
[2] https://www.dutchdatacenters.nl/en/statistics-2/
Ram is a commodity they have spikes in demand/shortage of supply which drive the price up like this.
I remember when there was a flood somewhere in Thailand in the 2011 and the prices of hardisks went up through the roof.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2011/10/17/thailand...
The abundance is there, it just isn't for you or other working class people
You thought that abundance would trickle down into the pockets of people that have to work for a living?
AI will lead to abundance. For those that own stuff and no longer have to pay for other people to work for them.
> abundance. For those that own stuff and no longer have to pay for other people to work for them.
Why are you saying that? Anybody working for a living (but saving money) can invest in AI stocks or ETFs and partake in that potential abundance. Robinhood accounts are free for all.
> Anybody working for a living
> (but saving money)
These two are already difficult or impossible for many people. Especially a big chunk of USAmericans have been living paycheck to paycheck for a long time now, often taking multiple jobs just to make ends meet.
And then to gamble it on a speculative market, whose value does not correlate with its performance (see e.g. Tesla, compare its sales / market share with its market value compared to other car manufacturers). That's bad advice. And for an individual, you'd only benefit a fraction from what the big shareholders etc earn. Investing is a secondary market.
4 replies →
...which almost everybody agrees is a bubble, wondering not if, but when it will burst.
Investing in AI companies is just about the last piece of advice I'd give someone who's struggling financially.
The billionaires will largely be fine. They hedge their bets and have plenty of spare assets on the side. Little guy investors? Not so much. They'll go from worrying about their retirement plan to worrying about becoming homeless.
Electricity prices are already skyrocketing, it's present - not next.
Yes electricity by more short-sighted, dirty methods (remember when crypto clowns bought an old fossil plant just for coin mining?) but more alarming, fresh water.
That can be a bigger problem for civilization.
>What's next? Electricity?
next?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/data-centers-are-concentrate...
"Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world?"
more money for shareholder, 5 Trillion Nvidia???? more like a quadrillion for nvidia market cap
>Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world?
That'll come with the bubble bursting and the mass sell off.
Drive prices have already exploded. New hard drives have doubled in price since the beginning of the year. I haven't checked SSD prices, but why would they not be crazy, too?
The AI bubble has also pushed up secondhand prices. I work in ewaste recycling. Two weeks ago, a petabyte's worth of hard drives showed up. After erasing, testing, listing, and selling them, I'll have a very merry Christmas.
I picked a really great time to give up PC Gaming for writing.
Given that everyone already answered what I had in mind, what can we do about it? What happened in the past where we might get answers from?
After the supply constraints of the post-covid period, are graphics cards really that more expensive?
How long do you estimate this period of supply constraint will be? Will manufacturers continue to be greedy, or will they grow less greedy as the supply improves based on the price signals the high price indicates?
Sounds like a business opportunity for someone to come in and scale better.
That's what happens when demand is higher than supply.
> Where the f*k is all the abundance that AI was supposed to bring into the world? /rant
It may have been a bit self-deprecating, but I think your “rant” is a more than justified question that really should be expanded well beyond just this matter. It’s related to a clear fraud that has been perpetrated upon the people of the western world in particular for many decades and generations now in many different ways. We have been told for decades and generations that “we have to plunder your money and debase of and give it to the rich that caused the {insert disaster caused by the ruling class} misery and we have to do it without any kind of consequences for the perpetrators and no, you don’t get any kind of ownership or investment and we have to do it now or the world will end”
In world history, the vast majority of abundance is downstream of conquest, not innovation. Plunder makes profit. Even in weird moments like today, where innovation is (or, at least, was) genuinely the driving force of abundance, that innovation would not have come about without the seed capital of Europe plundering Africa and the Americas.
Abundance isn't even the right framing. What most people actually want and need is a certain amount of resources - after which their needs are satiated and they move onto other endeavors. It's the elites that want abundance - i.e. infinite growth forever. The history of early agriculture is marked by hunter-gatherers outgrowing their natural limits, transitioning to farming, and then people figuring out that it's really fucking easy to just steal what others grow. Abundance came from making farmers overproduce to feed an unproductive elite. Subsistence farming gave way to farming practices that overtaxed the soil or risked crop failure.
The history of technology had, up until recently, bucked this trend. Computers got better and cheaper every 18 months because we had the time and money to exploit electricity and lithography to produce smaller computers that used less energy. This is abundance from innovation. The problem is, most people don't want abundance; the most gluttonous need for computational power can be satisfied with a $5000 gaming rig. So the tech industry has been dealing with declining demand, first with personal computers and then with smartphones.
AI fixes this problem, by being an endless demand for more and more compute with the economic returns to show for it. When AI people were talking about abundance, they were primarily telling their shareholders: We will build a machine that will make us kings of the new economy, and your equity shares will grant you seats in the new nobility. In this new economy, labor doesn't matter. We can automate away the entire working and middle classes, up to and including letting the new nobles hunt them down from helicopters for sport.
Ok, that's hyperbole. But assuming the AI bubble doesn't pop, I will agree that affordable CPUs are next on the chopping block. If that happens, modular / open computing is dead. The least restrictive computing environment normal people can afford will be a Macbook, solely because Apple has so much market power from iPhones that they can afford to keep the Mac around for vanity. We will get the dystopia RMS warned about, not from despotic control over computing, but from the fact that nobody will be able to afford to own their own computer anymore. Because abundance is very, very expensive.
It’s not hyperbole
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c246pv2n25zo
Actually, this seems to be mostly a spike in retail prices, not wholesale DRAM contracts that are only up 60% or so in the past few months according to Samsung. So we should most likely place at least some fraction of the blame on our fellow consumers for overreacting to the news and hoarding RAM at overinflated prices. DRAM sticks are the new toilet paper.
> Actually, this seems to be mostly a spike in retail prices, not wholesale DRAM contracts that are only up 60% or so in the past few months according to Samsung. So we should most likely place at least some fraction of the blame on our fellow consumers for overreacting to the news and hoarding RAM at overinflated prices. DRAM sticks are the new toilet paper.
What is your source on that? Moore's Law is Dead directly contradicts your claims by saying that OpenAI has purchased unfinished wafers to squeeze the market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw
Reuters: “Samsung hikes memory chip prices by up to 60% as shortage worsens, sources say,” Nov 14 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/samsung-hikes-memory-chi...
Tom’s Hardware: “Samsung raises memory chip prices by up to 60% since September as AI data-center buildout strangles supply,” Nov 2025. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/samsung-raises-me...
Note the consistent "up to 60% since September" figure in the above recent reports. That's for one module capacity, with others being up 30% to 50% - and it certainly isn't the 200% or more we're apparently seeing now in the retail market. That's pure panic hoarding, which is actually a very common overreaction to a sudden price spike.
"only" ? Nobody is hoarding RAM (at least yet, consumers seem mostly blindsided by it), this is directly caused by industry thirst for AI
Lenovo Stockpiling PC Memory Due to 'Unprecedented' AI Squeeze - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46041505