They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up - for higher margins I’m sure. MAG7 will happily pay more but poor consumers like us can’t - this is more bad news for us.
There are reputable eBay sellers shipping decomm'd previous-gen servers for bargain basement prices.
If you're fine running last gen (and you should be, for home lab use) then it's worth it to monitor prices over time.
They typically hit a floor, as supply from decomm waves coinciding swamps demand, but the resellers still want to move things as quickly as possible.
I don't know if I'd buy any of the servers or older computers but the internal components are pretty dang good. Stuff like hard drives, network cards, hbas, that's the real money saver right there.
I upgraded my home rack to use cx3 cards, and I sport a ds4246 that has a single 18tb sas hard drive in it lol.
Kind of cool I have 56gbps network between them, tho I can only get 30gbps at max in iperf3 lol (due to some pcie bw limit)
Unfortunately Weird Stuff is a thing of the past, though this had less to do with a reduced supply of surplus and more to do with Silicon Valley’s high real estate prices. Thankfully there are still good stuff to be found at e-waste recyclers, but if more companies are relying on the cloud, and if more devices are integrated boards with everything soldered on (such as most modern Apple hardware), the hand-me-downs of the future are going to be harder to work on than today’s hand-me-downs. I’m just an average software guy whose hardware experience is limited to a graduate-level computer architecture course and building PCs. I can talk about caching and branch prediction, but I’ve never picked up a soldering iron in my life; I’m no Louis Rossmann.
They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up
So yes, enterprise customers doing AI data centre buildouts. They are going all out for them at the expense of their consumer business due to supply constraints.
I don't see this situation changing for many years to come. Would indirectly affect the cost of any electronics that has storage or memory on it. Would be interesting to see how Samsung plays this one out with their limited inventory - they make RAM + SSDs, use it themselves on their phones, laptops, etc. Also supply to consumer and business customers. Interesting times.