Comment by bigbadfeline
13 hours ago
> I hate cloud.
It doesn't matter, the choice is being removed from the market. The clouders are already front running and scalping the hardware retail, just like scalpers were doing to GPUs during crypto.
Today's excuse is AI but it's the same process, just on an industrial scale - the clouders buy in bulk at low prices, create shortages and exorbitant retail pricing, which forces you to buy from them, providing them with nice profits. The only difference from vanilla scalping is, they sell the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear.
The process is unstoppable without legislative intervention, it works with or without the presence of inflation - front running assures the scalping of retail. The high tariffs on Chinese hardware and the draconian restrictions on selling them gear for semiconductor manufacturing remove the only natural remedy - competition.
On the other hand, the existing semiconductor manufacturers are highly incentivized to sell in bulk so some leave the retail market altogether to become exclusive suppliers to big cloud and big OEM - e.g. Micron.
Which is going to work, only if people will buy into it. However if they won't (see Google Stadia or Micrslop's crying about people refusing Copilot) then whole thing will just implode into a lot of cheap hardware everywhere.