WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
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The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.
If it’s temporary I can live with it.
I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.
Given this has been going on for years at this point, the high prices of graphics cards through crypto and now AI, it feels like this is the new normal, forever propped up by the next grift.
Sure you have to isolate certain rogue states - North Korea, Russia, USA. Always the way.
US is medium risk and increasing rapidly. Run away quickly.
Big tech will be deemed "too big to fail" and will get a bail out. The tax payers will suffer.
That's how inflation works. In this case it seems more narrow though, there's hope the prices will go down. Especially if the AI hype finds a reason to flounder.
Just like the price of labour. Your salary went up and doesn't come down
In the UK weekly earnings increased 34% from December 2019 to December 2025.
CPI went up 30% in the same period.
Obviously that CPI covers things which went up more, and things which went up less, and your personal inflation will be different to everyone elses. Petrol prices end of Jan 2020 were 128p a litre, end of Jan 2025 they are 132p a litre [0]. Indeed petrol prices were 132p in January 2013. If you drive 40,000 miles a year you will thus see far lower inflation than someone who doesn't drive.
How many useless living humans do you know? They go somewhere. Something happens to them. Whatever it is it’s about to happen to 30% of the population.
What’s the opposite of survivor bias?
Citation: nvidia/openai circular loans network.
Oh, I can think of about 77 million right off the top of my head.
Hyperscalars refresh hardware and firesale old stock.
~2028 is going to see a lot of high power refurb supply hit the market.
Forget the details, as it's been a decade+, but everything gets junked at some point.
They're almost always stripped down, then sold as board+chassis only.
Had some weirdo AMD GPUs that were GCP-only that were offered to folks if you bought in bulk quantity. A whole ton of whitebox Ethernet switches from Facebook were on the market a number of years ago.
Lots of weird stuff like OCP 25G NICs that only were bought in quantity by hyperscalers as well come out in waves. You don't see a lot of these things hit eBay and traditional "used marketplaces" but they are out there if you know where to look and have connections with liquidators. You're unlikely to get deals on a few here and there though unless the market becomes absolutely saturated - usually hundreds are MoQ for a lot of these things.
Storage will be unlikely to see as the risk:reward for a giant company usually is too great. If data was ever written to them, typically they will be shredded vs. secure wiped. Very few large corporations want to take the risk of some liquidator either not running a proper wipe process or something slipping through the cracks. Even with encrypted drives I haven't seen much in quantity hit unless they were quite literally never utilized and straight pulls from large JBOD orders or the like. However, ServerDirect and other places seem to have cracked this nut a little bit considering the number of refurb drives they run through - not sure what their sources are though. Certainly not hyperscaler levels in any case.
GPU prices never went back to normal. Harddrives neither, I bought 14TB drives 10 years ago for €200, they've never been that low again.
Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.
Same way the price of groceries going up means people buy only what they need and ditch the superfluous.
I can understand that incumbents may not want to overinvest in capacity, which could be financially precarious, but they are also putting themselves in danger by opening up avenues for competition. One more thing ruined by AI mania, I suppose.
I wasn't saying it'll be good and that the good guys win, but a lot of insane creativity to circumvent restrictions will pop up.
The Demoscene will save us all
No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.
Work is fucked. 23TB of RAM online. Microservices FTW. Not. Each node has OS overhead. Each pod has language VM overhead. And the architecture can only cost more over time. On top of that "storage is cheap so we won't bother to delete anything". Stupid mentality across the board.
It could even become a kind of renaissance of efficient code… if there is any need for code at all.
The five guys left online might even get efficient and fast loading websites.
Honorable mention of the NO-TECH and LOW-TECH magazine site because I liked the effort at exploring efficient use of technology, e.g., their ~500KB solar powered site.
We went from using technology to solve problems to the diametric opposite of creating new problems to solve with technology. The latter will have to contract considerably. As you say, many problems can be solved without code. If they even need to be solved in the first place.
On the efficiency front, most of what we built is for developer efficiency rather than runtime efficiency. Also needs to stop.
I'm a big fan of low tech. I still write notes on paper and use a film camera. Thanks for the link - right up my street!
/s
Since when have developers ever lowered hardware requirements? Prosumers will just cough up the extra money while casual users will continue to be left in the dust, like they have been for practically the last decade (or longer).
Can you DM me your contact details? I have a nice shiny new bridge that I can get you a great deal on.
In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs.
As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much.
So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and additional demand from the new AI centers.
I feel like the AI centers are just buying HDDs because why not throw a HDD in each server blade even if there is no need? The money is there to be spent and it must be spent.
As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.
I will end with an imperfect analogy with multiplayer gaming. It is quite common in multiplayer games for higher level players to wish to acquire some tradeskill they neglected to acquire earlier. maybe a new quest appears, or new "must have" item that requires such skill.
They (past me included) have too much game money and no wish to acquire tradeskill items slowly. So the "rich" will overpay by 2x or 10x or even 100x the usual price.
That is free market at work right?
In the process whole low level economy is destroyed due to 2nd order effects. Meaning a new player starting out can only be a farmer.
So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?
We have a long way to go before the average PC costs even half as much as it did in 1989 (adjusted for inflation). And of course the performance for typical consumer use is orders of magnitude better than it was back then.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1q9zd0f/power_sup...
Buy used stuff? 99.9% of consumers have no need for anywhere near the cutting edge tech. I do far more than most people and get by just fine with a workstation I bought used in 2014. My newest Laptop is ~2018 and that was only because I wanted something with 4K that I could flip to tablet.
Raspberry PI's, SOCS, Microcontrollers, there's a million things today that are awesome. Are hobbyist students needing to build datacenters!?
What's next, the great CPU shortage of 2026?
https://twitter.com/sama/status/2023233085509410833
Funny how they all meet at the "You'll own nothing" Swiss club.
On the other hand the total storage capacity shipped each year has risen, as a combination of HDDs getting larger and larger, and demand shifting from smaller consumer HDDs to larger data center, enterprise and NAS HDDs. I'm not sure how flexible those production lines are, but maybe the reaction will be shifting even more capacity to higher-capacity drives with cutting-edge technology
Also, the Return of PKZIP.
Now that crypto has failed to paperclip maximize the world, maybe LLMs are attempt number two.
As I understand it, the technology holders for this specific line of technology are Korea (Samsung), Japan (Toshiba), and US (WD/Seagate).
I don’t think China ever developed the tooling internally? Am I wrong?
This feels like the ballpoint pen situation. Where China could build everything but the ballpoint since it took specialized machinery. But HDD gets to be a hard sell with how far NAND has come, and China could just lean on economies of scale here and skip the hard work of what at some point could become overcomplicated abandonware technology. Similar to approach between internal combustion cars and EV’s…
EDIT: And I am very aware production happens in places like Thailand, I don’t forget the flood pricing, I also don’t forget clamcoin shortages. Specifically mean where the core expertise is held.
This is assuming most of what we stored are either images or video.
Which goes into why I think this might be good. Developers have kind of treated disks as "oh well" with binaries ballooning in size, even when it can easily solved, and there is little care to make things lightweight. Just like I now figure out a different solution to recover space, I'm hoping with a shortage this kind of thing will be more widespread, and we'll end up with smaller things until the shortage is over. "Necessity is the mother of all invention" or however it goes.
China is now the only solution to fix broken western controlled markets.
The solution then is removing the product from market till local competition takes its place.
And for the same reason - to avoid the dominant players going "oh shiny" on short term lucrative adventures or outright trying to manipulate the market - causing people to starve and making society grind to a halt.
Still, at least in the short to medium term, there are many companies, institutions and individuals that are used to getting new hardware that is under warranty - developer hardware refreshes, store hardware updates and deployments, some schools and academic institutions that provide hardware to students or even just people getting a laptop for schools use.
I think people would be used to getting new hardware for all of these & might be pretty much left out cold without a machine or having to opt for a reused or resold machine without the necessary technical knowledge to support it themselves.
> They largely come from hyperscalers who want hard drives for their AI data centers, for example to store training data on them.
What type of training data? LLMs need relatively little of that. For example, DeepSeek-V3 [1], still a relatively large model:
> We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens
At 2 bytes per token, that's 29.6 terabytes. That's basically nothing compared to the amount of 4K content that is uploaded to YouTube every day.
Gpu I understand but hard drive looks excessive. It's like if tomorrow there is a shortage of computer cabling because ai datacenter needs some.
There are many new data-centers they are being filled with servers. Most servers have at least 2 HDD (mirror) for the OS. I would not be surprised if on a huge scale even 2 HDD per server could cause HDD shortage.
There are likely models which are trained on 4k video and it should be stored somewhere too.
Even things like logs and metrics can consume petabytes for a large (and complex) cluster. And the less mature the software the more logs you need to debug it in production.
In the AI race investments if not unlimited at least abundant. In such conditions optimization of hardware usage is the waste of time and velocity is the only things which matters.
So hopefully once they all go bust, there should be a lot of cheap enterprise HDDs on the marked as creditors pick through the wreckage. :)
Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
There is appetite in some circles for a consumer boycott but not much coordination on targets.
its not being used anywhere lol where are they meant to boycott?
That's when I sell of my current hardware and house, buy a cow and some land somewhere in the boondocks and become a hermit.
"You will use AI, because that will be the only way you will have a relaxed life. You will pay for it, own nothing and be content. Nobody cares if you are happy or not."
You also have to look at the current status of the market. The level of investment in data centers spurred by AI are unlikely to last unless massive gains materialize. It's pretty clear some manufacturers are betting things will cool down and don't want to overcommit.
Could we though? Even if gerrymandering and voter suppression weren't already out of control, and getting worse, there are very few politicians who could or would do anything about all this.
Elections aren't going to save us.
Then they came for the RAM, but I did not speak out, for I had already closed Firefox.
Then they came for the hard drives, but I did not speak out, for I had the cloud.
Then my NAS died, and there was no drive left to restore from backup.
The real advantage of SSDs in this use case is storage density and power efficiency. On the other hand, your compute resources might be packed in so tight with power-intensive stuff that you appreciate the spinning rust “wasting” space.
You have 31/999 credits remaining. What activity would you like to productively participate in today?
(Source: this has actually happened to me.)
Source: I've been using Chrome's built in translation heavily since around 2018-19, and not before that only because that's the time I've realized it'd became god damn good.
Maybe to clarify my argument a little bit more, "AI" was already good and was being used for useful/productive purposes before it became the hype. It'd be better had it stay the same way instead of it being the latest money generation machine and sucking the air out of the room.