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.
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.
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!
No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.
/s
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