Most of the companies in the tech industry are parasites. Just ticks on the backs of your Microsoft, Google, and Apple, sucking away money and adding nothing.
Source: I used to work for Accenture and this is the company's "consulting" business in a nutshell
They avoid paying taxes in a myriad of ways (look up the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich for example), profit massively off of stealing and selling personal data from people, electricity consumption of data centers drives up local electricity prices effectively passing the bill to everyone there, taking over FOSS projects and stifling them, buying companies to monopolise the market...
I’m on the other end of the business spectrum (tiny by comparison) and let me tell you that “consultants” exist to suck money out of all businesses, not just the big ones. One of the easiest ways to identify a small business that struggling is when their owner starts, offering consulting services, in my opinion anyway.
The market isn’t just irrational at this point it’s unhinged. Allowing an unprofitable startup to corner DRAM supply not because it needs it but to stop other competitors to make use of it is insane. It’s going to have real impact on other industries and hasten a global recession when the inevitable crash occurs.
Absolutely no tax payer bailout for these people and their investors.
That’s what tech companies did with actual employees during and after COVID too. They overhired and expanded during the period of low interest rates, just to ensure they had staff “just in case,” and to keep those people away from competitors.
Everyone seems to forget the tech hiring bubble during COVID.
As world economies have had slowdowns and recessions post-COVID, tech has been able to lay off their surplus staff and claim it's due to AI, further inflating the bubble.
This is unrestrained free-market capitalism, with a handful of huge winners and a giant basket of big losers.
It's really great for the winners, and bad for literally everyone else as the damage splashes over to average Americans in the form of increased prices, loss of privacy and control over their lives, mass layoffs, etc.
This has been the biggest capital race in human history, and the losses will be tremendous and shared by 90% of us.
I'd love to see that pitchfork shortage due to the rising demand. But I am not holding my breath waiting for common folks to finally point their fingers the right way.
If the rest of the world thinks it might stay bad enough for too long they will probably step in by directly lobbying the governments controlling the companies involved with shipping out the critical parts. South Korea should be pretty sensitive to their largest manufacturers possibly putting themselves in a vulnerable position whereas Taiwan has the set dressing to understand looking for maximizing cash volumes yesterday
I don't know what the stated bailout rationale would be - we need airlines, and we need car companies I guess, and banks, but we don't need AI companies.
I am guessing that they will claim that without a bailout their stupidity will impact Main Street, also lobbying and donations would be freely flowing.
There’s not going to be that big or a crash. Microsoft and Google are well positioned. They will be acquiring GPT, Cluade, Perplexity, and many of the others when the run out of funds.
They'll push for a bailout. Seems more likely to happen if the bubble pops under Republican control.
They didn't take anyone out back when they fucked up shit during housing problems. We didn't even implement regulations to prevent the same bullshit from happening again. The current dem leadership isn't much better on this issue when they've bought into neo-liberal ideals of being pro-corporate. They are better and there are other issues it just won't be FDR new deal better until leadership is replaced.
Yes I did, it doesn’t matter if they knew, the issue is that an unprofitable startup has been allowed to corner the DRAM market for no other reason than to hinder competitors. Even the most optimistic predictions of AGI put it at least 5 years away, whilst most academics and researchers have it at least a decade away . The fact that billions are being spent to cripple competitors instead of being invested in research and development doesn’t bode well for AGI.
I got 64 gigs of ddr4 for my am4 build because my 32 gb was faulty. got that 32 RMA'd awhile ago thinking i'd eventually put it in and get up to 96. Now i'm either going to build another am4 machine with it, or sell it and buy a ferrari.
Go you! I'm paying through the nose for my new computer, but I got some incredible deals on refurbished photography equipment since July, so I guess you win some, lose some.
I wonder if this venture of theirs will end up killing the game industry. It generates more revenue than music and movie industries combined, the economic impact can be huge, even if it only damages it a bit
The AI industry is making circular investments into each other at breackneck speed, so there is tons of money moving, despite a lot less money actually existing.
OpenAI is reinvesting investments made into OpenAI, which a few steps later gets reinvested into OpenAI again, which they reinvest again.
That's why people are calling out an AI bubble, this inflates stock prices due to expectations of all the future profitability from these current investments. But the only companies in this corporate circlejerk actually making turning an increased profit right now are the traditional hardware producers milking the bubble, not the AI.
Hold stock in the shovel company. Have the shovel company invest in the handle company, have the handle company invest in the blade company, have the blade company invest in the shovel company. Sell your stock in the shovel company.
One key difference, back then most of that growth was financed by capital. Now, a lot of this investment is financed on debt. When this bubble bursts it will send huge ripples across the entire economy.
Only for the people not holding physical goods. Altman is ahead of the scam in some respects, because when shit starts exploding, he will have tangible goods while everyone else will be available to be scooped up for pennies on the dollar as extremely distressed prices.
Manufacturers still have a need for DRAM and the like as well. They'll be in a prime position to gouge anyone lower in the stack who has legitimate need for DRAM.
OpenAI is sitting on huge amounts of hardware. I don't fully buy into the idea that they're buying it to fuel their construction. I think they're just doing a lot of asset speculation with a fig leaf to make it look like its not blatant market manipulation tactics.
Even if thats true, the only ones who need that hardware are them, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon. If the bubble collapses it will be near worthless, it will also be worthless in a couple years as new hardware releases. I just don't see the angle unless its literally to scam out as quick as possible.
No one has the public deals, that I know of, but the deal is very unlikely to be warehouses of raw wafers and more capacity. They could theoretically sell it off but only as long as the speculation holds and not for a massive sum unless there is a serious restriction.
If it gets bad enough, Microsoft will need to liquidate openai hardware that depreciates faster and harder than used cars do. They already push 5-6year depreciation numbers farther than the normal 3-4 years on their books.
simply hoping that Trumpy will bail them out when they go broke?
AI expenditures are driving the numbers of an otherwise slow US economy. When this bubble inevitably bursts, they will certainly be deemed too big to fail, and taxpayers will be the ones picking up the bill.
My guess is they'll get it from Microsoft who'll get RAM, they want Foxconn to increase Xbox production which you wouldn't do if there are no RAM available.
The “investments” are a lot of shell game future promises and if/then. It’s circular dealing. The old funny joke about two economists paying one $100 to eat poop then that one challenges the other to do the same. They raised the gdp by $200 but both had to eat crap and nothing else changed.
That’s basically the AI industry right now. Nvidia has some sketchy claims about what it’s sold and we don’t have the infrastructure to be using it? So that stuff is just sitting there depreciating in warehouses. It’s all a huge mess.
Sounds very anti-competitive and probably illegal. I doubt the Trump admin will do anything though as it is AI so maybe we need some states to stand up.
My humble only moderately educated opinion is that the biggest threat to companies like OpenAI, are users who realize that many (not all, but many) of their AI needs can be met by small open source models running locally.
Many of those people will want to beef up their home rigs with some additional RAM and this could hinder that a little. I know, GPU vs PC RAM plays different roles in running a model.
The bubble can’t pop soon enough. It’s gonna hurt the economy something fierce, but fuck it, burn it all down. This is ridiculous. And for what? To make funny images and analyze data poorly?
I enjoy AI. I really do. It’s fun. I have a good time with it. But this shit is not worth the squeeze. Fuck AI. Fuck data centers. Fuck Sam Altman and fuck nvidia too.
For $20/month, I’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars on graphic design, hr consulting, and low level office tasks that would need to be delegated to an entry level employee.
And it’s only getting better.
AI is here to stay, and not because it’s fun to use, but because it’s invaluable to the business community.
All the AI companies providing you said tools are running on a loss to provide them to you at a cheap rate, wait until the costs hit these companies and they start charging you 10x more. AI is expensive to run.
We're not talking 10x more. ChatGPT isn't turning a profit on its $200/month plan. If your "small business" was spending tens of thousands of dollars on graphic design and consulting that frequently, it's probably doomed either way.
But along with the HR consulting and document generation, business coaching, signage copy writing, and quick (and at times batched) response drafting for professional correspondence, yeah, $1000/month would still be a value to my business.
Not the insane value that $20/month or even $200/month is, but a worthwhile and (given our average monthly NOI of $18k/month) manageable expenditure.
And I just own an expanding chain of laundromats. I’m sure a business that was more complex would have even more use for these tools
Sams business plan is the same and Michael Saylors with bitcoin. Corner the market by buying as much of the supply as possible to lock everyone else out.
Complaining about high demand is misplaced anger. The real question is why can’t supply rise to meet demand?
Start looking into how the regulatory environment in the United States has made it nearly impossible for companies like Micron to increase their manufacturing footprint. That’s where you will find your real villains.
Samsung, Sk Hynix, and Micron aren't constructing additional fabs beyond what they've already committed to with their existing roadmaps because it is not in their economic best interest to do so in the long term. Regulations have absolutely nothing to do with it.
When the AI bubble pops (when, not if), all of those additional multi billion dollar facilities will have to be idled (probably right around the time they would be scheduled to come online) because consumer demand is not going to be high enough to justify their operation and there is going to be a massive oversupply of stock that will have to be essentially fire sold because the handful of companies that were buying it by the cargo container full are so overloaded with debt bankruptcy probably wouldn't keep them alive.
Additionally, they've started paying very close attention to some of the questions investors are asking the likes of Altman and have been left rather unimpressed because the responses to those questions have been 1) ignore them while amplifying hype and 2) privately seek out hundreds of billions in possible government bailouts.
Were I Samsung, Micron, Sk Hynix, or Kioxia, I wouldn't be willing to spend billions spinning up new fans at the behest of the gaggle of carnival barkers knocking on my door waving IOUs instead of actual money for future fulfillment as I see them implicitly admit they are turbo fucked the moment they can no longer sustain hype.
It’s not bullshit and you have no fucking clue what you are talking about
Micron is trying to build one of the largest fabs in the world specifically for DRAM in upstate New York. They have had the land and infrastructure secured for years but have yet to put a single shovel into the ground because of kafkaesque environmental regulations involving migratory bats from Canada.
I guess reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.
I said they aren't willing to invest beyond their existing roadmaps. The facility you're prattling on about has been in the pipeline before the AI hype even really took off.
I honestly can’t even begin to understand what your point is. The world is in a massive RAM shortage. One of the largest RAM manufacturers in the world has been trying to build the largest RAM manufacturing facility in the world in America and it has been delayed by a solid 10 years due to regulatory nonsense.
What are you even arguing? That Micron isn’t investing beyond the things that they are very obviously investing in but can’t get built? Like that is your actual argument?
I honestly can’t even begin to understand what your point is. The world is in a massive RAM shortage.
And? Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have either already started or have pledged to shift production away from DRAM and NAND to HBM because the margins are astronomically higher and the demand is nearly infinite. The DRAM and NAND flash production lines that haven't been shifted are having the majority of their wafers bought by a handful of companies attempting to deny each other access to those commodities even though none have the capacity to actually use even a fraction of them at present and arguably won't in the future (data centers packed floor to roof with servers aren't useful if the local gas, water, and electrical infrastructure can't support them).
One of the largest RAM manufacturers in the world has been trying to build the largest RAM manufacturing facility in the world in America and it has been delayed by a solid 10 years due to regulatory nonsense
And if it had come online it would have changed the current situation....how, exactly? Micron just killed off their Crucial brand and (repeating myself) said they will be shifting their production lines to higher margin products. Again, that's HBM. So your big, bad ass mega fab would still see its lines gradually getting pulled offline and retooled to make a type of product the average consumer, enterprise client, mobile device vendor, industrial hardware vendor, medical hardware vendor, and automotive manufacturer does not and cannot use. And just like with their competition, the pittance that would've been left for consumer hardware production would still have the lion's share being panic bought by dipshits like Altman 1 year/2 years before the ICs are even scheduled to be made.
What are you even arguing?
Bitching about environmental and construction regulations ignores the reality of the situation we find ourselves in; you're can't satisfy near infinite demand when most of that demand actually comes from, "Fuck you, I'm buying this just so you can't have it!" and is being fueled by incomprehensible levels of debt that doesn't seem particularly concerned with ever being converted into profit. It also ignores the reality that memory vendors are very, very cautious about committing to the construction of new fabs to meet the demands of a new fad (that, again, investors are already starting to question) because having done just that in the past led to such massive gluts of inventory that they all had to idle production *for months* to keep the pricing from free falling into unprofitability.
They are moving out of commercial markets into higher margin business because they are output constrained! Is the average person seriously so fucking stupid now that they can’t connect these dots?
They would make more money if they could serve all markets. They can’t serve all markets because they can’t build enough fast enough so they prioritize the most profitable markets.
Demand is not infinite, that’s bullshit, and to the extent that certain companies are trying to corner the market on memory it’s because they correctly identified that companies like Micron were not going to be able to get long planned new fab online fast enough to meet demand. These two things are causally connected.
The environmental thing is not hypothetical. It is what is actually happening in New York with Micron’s flagship fab project. Five years of delays because of fucking migratory bats from Canada. That is a real thing that is happening. It should make people furious.
They are moving out of commercial markets into higher margin business because they are output constrained! Is the average person seriously so fucking stupid now that
It straight up doesn't. Micron could have encountered zero roadblocks building their fab and we'd be in the same fucking position we find ourselves now because the constraints would be exactly the same.
And the constraint is:
When you have a handful of companies willing to individually set fire to hundreds of billions of dollars trying to 1) chase construction targets and rollouts that are totally detached from reality and 2) desperately attempting to fuck each other over in the process, your actual capacity doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because the majority of those buyers have shown they aren't worried about taking on obscene debt to buy volume the picosecond it becomes available or to search it from someone else even if they literally have no other choice but to let their purchases collect dust in shipping containers for what might be years nor are they worried about fulfillment to the degree investors are becoming increasingly alarmed because 50-60% fulfillment just results in getting another dump truck of money to buy shit so far in advance the metals used to make it probably haven't been refined.
And since you have been through more than one boom/bust, you're a little apprehensive about expanding beyond your own roadmaps because, at some point, you know investors and creditors are going to start calling that debt, the infinite money glitch stops, and you'd be left with an excess of extremely capital intensive facilities that have to be kept operational in some capacity but with a fraction of the demand to justify their existence.
Micron could have built that mega fab and it would have resulted in no change because someone like Altman would be there with a checkbook asking, "What's your price for __% of your total global output?" just as has been done with Samsung and SK Hynix. And just like Sk Hynix and Samsung, they aren't keen on building beyond what they already said they would have for the reasons above even if you waved any and all regulations concerning their concentration.
You could will another 3 fabs into existence tomorrow with the Infinity Gauntlet as you sit on the shitter and all of their production into 2028 will have been secured in the time it takes you to pinch off a turd to the time it hits the water.
Five years of delays because of fucking migratory bats from Canada
Oh no, we can't completely destroy the environment in the name of capitalism right fucking now. The horror.
This is literally the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever read.
Apparently when a good is shortage it’s impossible to relieve the shortage by building a lot more of it because infinite demand will immediately swallow it all up.
Seems like Sam's business model is to become as much of a parasite as possible
Most of the companies in the tech industry are parasites. Just ticks on the backs of your Microsoft, Google, and Apple, sucking away money and adding nothing.
Source: I used to work for Accenture and this is the company's "consulting" business in a nutshell
Microsoft, Google and Apple are parasites in their own way too.
How?
They avoid paying taxes in a myriad of ways (look up the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich for example), profit massively off of stealing and selling personal data from people, electricity consumption of data centers drives up local electricity prices effectively passing the bill to everyone there, taking over FOSS projects and stifling them, buying companies to monopolise the market...
There's a lot.
I’m on the other end of the business spectrum (tiny by comparison) and let me tell you that “consultants” exist to suck money out of all businesses, not just the big ones. One of the easiest ways to identify a small business that struggling is when their owner starts, offering consulting services, in my opinion anyway.
As the CEO of Y Combinator (a famous startup accelerator) he helped educate lots of parasites in his parasitic ways.
Wasn't he the CEO of Reddit once?
EDIT: he was CEO, for about eight days before Ellen Pao got appointed.
I don't think Altman was ever involved with Reddit...Also, before IPO, he was also listed as the third largest shareholder and part of the board until 2022.
FTFY. They all do this.
Learning to not trust guys named Sam
How dare you malign the bravest hobbit of them all?
Literally the Plan since Elon was still involved in OpenAI
The market isn’t just irrational at this point it’s unhinged. Allowing an unprofitable startup to corner DRAM supply not because it needs it but to stop other competitors to make use of it is insane. It’s going to have real impact on other industries and hasten a global recession when the inevitable crash occurs.
Absolutely no tax payer bailout for these people and their investors.
That’s what tech companies did with actual employees during and after COVID too. They overhired and expanded during the period of low interest rates, just to ensure they had staff “just in case,” and to keep those people away from competitors.
Everyone seems to forget the tech hiring bubble during COVID.
As world economies have had slowdowns and recessions post-COVID, tech has been able to lay off their surplus staff and claim it's due to AI, further inflating the bubble.
This is unrestrained free-market capitalism, with a handful of huge winners and a giant basket of big losers.
It's really great for the winners, and bad for literally everyone else as the damage splashes over to average Americans in the form of increased prices, loss of privacy and control over their lives, mass layoffs, etc.
This has been the biggest capital race in human history, and the losses will be tremendous and shared by 90% of us.
I'd love to see that pitchfork shortage due to the rising demand. But I am not holding my breath waiting for common folks to finally point their fingers the right way.
If the rest of the world thinks it might stay bad enough for too long they will probably step in by directly lobbying the governments controlling the companies involved with shipping out the critical parts. South Korea should be pretty sensitive to their largest manufacturers possibly putting themselves in a vulnerable position whereas Taiwan has the set dressing to understand looking for maximizing cash volumes yesterday
Project stargate and genesis mission is pretty much already a taxpayer bailout for openAI
I don't know what the stated bailout rationale would be - we need airlines, and we need car companies I guess, and banks, but we don't need AI companies.
I am guessing that they will claim that without a bailout their stupidity will impact Main Street, also lobbying and donations would be freely flowing.
They’ll also say it’s a matter of national security because ‘we can’t allow China to get ahead’
There’s not going to be that big or a crash. Microsoft and Google are well positioned. They will be acquiring GPT, Cluade, Perplexity, and many of the others when the run out of funds.
Trump will bail out big tech companies. Why else are they lining up giving him gifts?
To be fair, he does tend to screw people who kneel down to him at times. Would be kinda funny if he told them to fuck off.
They'll push for a bailout. Seems more likely to happen if the bubble pops under Republican control.
They didn't take anyone out back when they fucked up shit during housing problems. We didn't even implement regulations to prevent the same bullshit from happening again. The current dem leadership isn't much better on this issue when they've bought into neo-liberal ideals of being pro-corporate. They are better and there are other issues it just won't be FDR new deal better until leadership is replaced.
I'm very curious if the US will bail them out this time, the debt seems simply too big to be justified, even for Trump
How is it allowed by the board of a supposed ”Public Benefit Corporation”?
Did you not read the article? Neither supplier knew openai was making deals with the other
that makes it worse in aggregate
Yes I did, it doesn’t matter if they knew, the issue is that an unprofitable startup has been allowed to corner the DRAM market for no other reason than to hinder competitors. Even the most optimistic predictions of AGI put it at least 5 years away, whilst most academics and researchers have it at least a decade away . The fact that billions are being spent to cripple competitors instead of being invested in research and development doesn’t bode well for AGI.
Ah - so it's Sam's fault my 64gb of RAM cost more ($680) than a PS.
I bet they use their tech to find any precursor to deadly diseases so we can't even hope for that
Holy shit! I bought 64GB ram on July 12 for $189...
I bought 64GB at the end of October for 200
I got 64 gigs of ddr4 for my am4 build because my 32 gb was faulty. got that 32 RMA'd awhile ago thinking i'd eventually put it in and get up to 96. Now i'm either going to build another am4 machine with it, or sell it and buy a ferrari.
I bought 64GB of RAM (G.Skill Ripjaws M5 NEO RGB EXPO 2x32GB C28) back in May for £269.99. That same kit is now £829.99.
Glad you bought in May!
Mid July, 270cdn for my 64GB DDR5 ram...its been floating around a grand for a month now (same SKU, same etailer). How did I luck into that.
Go you! I'm paying through the nose for my new computer, but I got some incredible deals on refurbished photography equipment since July, so I guess you win some, lose some.
Holy shit, the 64GB kit I paid $235 for in August is now going for $841.99. Absolute insanity.
I wonder if this venture of theirs will end up killing the game industry. It generates more revenue than music and movie industries combined, the economic impact can be huge, even if it only damages it a bit
Reminder that even if it recovers it never will reach levels it did before because ram manufacturers like samsung are colluding to prevent it
Does OpenAI even have the cash to fund all of the deals it’s making, or simply hoping that Trumpy will bail them out when they go broke?
The AI industry is making circular investments into each other at breackneck speed, so there is tons of money moving, despite a lot less money actually existing.
OpenAI is reinvesting investments made into OpenAI, which a few steps later gets reinvested into OpenAI again, which they reinvest again.
That's why people are calling out an AI bubble, this inflates stock prices due to expectations of all the future profitability from these current investments. But the only companies in this corporate circlejerk actually making turning an increased profit right now are the traditional hardware producers milking the bubble, not the AI.
During a gold rush, sell shovels
Hold stock in the shovel company. Have the shovel company invest in the handle company, have the handle company invest in the blade company, have the blade company invest in the shovel company. Sell your stock in the shovel company.
Better yet, take all your profits from selling shovels and invest in your customer’s mines so that they have more cash on hand to buy more shovels.
That was the previous phase of the AI mania.
Nowadays is to corner the shovel market paying with shovel-bucks.
All with the end game of becoming feudal shovel lord when shovel-ware nobody wants shoveled down their throat leaves all peasants jobless, forever.
Then after the crash you can retool your equipment to produce pitchforks.
This is exactly the same shit that was happening in the early 2000s before the dot com bubble burst.
One key difference, back then most of that growth was financed by capital. Now, a lot of this investment is financed on debt. When this bubble bursts it will send huge ripples across the entire economy.
Only for the people not holding physical goods. Altman is ahead of the scam in some respects, because when shit starts exploding, he will have tangible goods while everyone else will be available to be scooped up for pennies on the dollar as extremely distressed prices.
What tangible goods? GPUs for datacenters that no one will need due to over supply? Financed from deals that will claw them back?
Promises of datacenters that are impossible to create?
Promises to consume DRAM usage without a place to use it?
Manufacturers still have a need for DRAM and the like as well. They'll be in a prime position to gouge anyone lower in the stack who has legitimate need for DRAM.
OpenAI is sitting on huge amounts of hardware. I don't fully buy into the idea that they're buying it to fuel their construction. I think they're just doing a lot of asset speculation with a fig leaf to make it look like its not blatant market manipulation tactics.
Even if thats true, the only ones who need that hardware are them, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon. If the bubble collapses it will be near worthless, it will also be worthless in a couple years as new hardware releases. I just don't see the angle unless its literally to scam out as quick as possible.
I think the main tangible good is what was mentioned in the article - warehouses and warehouses full of raw wafers he can turn into DRAM
No one has the public deals, that I know of, but the deal is very unlikely to be warehouses of raw wafers and more capacity. They could theoretically sell it off but only as long as the speculation holds and not for a massive sum unless there is a serious restriction.
If it gets bad enough, Microsoft will need to liquidate openai hardware that depreciates faster and harder than used cars do. They already push 5-6year depreciation numbers farther than the normal 3-4 years on their books.
AI expenditures are driving the numbers of an otherwise slow US economy. When this bubble inevitably bursts, they will certainly be deemed too big to fail, and taxpayers will be the ones picking up the bill.
So is this what ‘winning the AI race’ means? Becoming so big that the govt needs to bail u out when things go sour? /s
My guess is they'll get it from Microsoft who'll get RAM, they want Foxconn to increase Xbox production which you wouldn't do if there are no RAM available.
The “investments” are a lot of shell game future promises and if/then. It’s circular dealing. The old funny joke about two economists paying one $100 to eat poop then that one challenges the other to do the same. They raised the gdp by $200 but both had to eat crap and nothing else changed.
That’s basically the AI industry right now. Nvidia has some sketchy claims about what it’s sold and we don’t have the infrastructure to be using it? So that stuff is just sitting there depreciating in warehouses. It’s all a huge mess.
But we gotta win that AI Race against China, right? A race with no finish lines or goals.
By some estimates OpenAI is losing/burning $1.5-2 million every HOUR. Even the holy chatgpt itself will spit out this info when asked.
So no, no they don't.
Fuck Sam Altman.
Sounds very anti-competitive and probably illegal. I doubt the Trump admin will do anything though as it is AI so maybe we need some states to stand up.
My humble only moderately educated opinion is that the biggest threat to companies like OpenAI, are users who realize that many (not all, but many) of their AI needs can be met by small open source models running locally. Many of those people will want to beef up their home rigs with some additional RAM and this could hinder that a little. I know, GPU vs PC RAM plays different roles in running a model.
Sam CTRL Man,
This grinch needs to be regulated.
Dark gray backgrounds with gray text are way too hard to read. Whoever made this site needs to retake basic color theory.
I had to flip on Firefox's reader view, the contrast was too low otherwise.
[deleted]
It's fine, but the font is a bit thin.
The bubble can’t pop soon enough. It’s gonna hurt the economy something fierce, but fuck it, burn it all down. This is ridiculous. And for what? To make funny images and analyze data poorly?
I enjoy AI. I really do. It’s fun. I have a good time with it. But this shit is not worth the squeeze. Fuck AI. Fuck data centers. Fuck Sam Altman and fuck nvidia too.
AI is incredibly useful to small businesses.
For $20/month, I’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars on graphic design, hr consulting, and low level office tasks that would need to be delegated to an entry level employee.
And it’s only getting better.
AI is here to stay, and not because it’s fun to use, but because it’s invaluable to the business community.
All the AI companies providing you said tools are running on a loss to provide them to you at a cheap rate, wait until the costs hit these companies and they start charging you 10x more. AI is expensive to run.
10x more would still be a steal 🤷♂️
More power to you. Just don't be too reliant on it, since when the bubble will inevitably bursts, hope your company doesn't go under along with them.
The tools aren’t essential to my business, but they sure do save me a lot of money, and would continue to do so at a considerably higher price point.
We're not talking 10x more. ChatGPT isn't turning a profit on its $200/month plan. If your "small business" was spending tens of thousands of dollars on graphic design and consulting that frequently, it's probably doomed either way.
It’d be a money saver for me at $1000/month
You were spending over $1000/month on graphic design for a small business?
Graphic design alone? No.
But along with the HR consulting and document generation, business coaching, signage copy writing, and quick (and at times batched) response drafting for professional correspondence, yeah, $1000/month would still be a value to my business.
Not the insane value that $20/month or even $200/month is, but a worthwhile and (given our average monthly NOI of $18k/month) manageable expenditure.
And I just own an expanding chain of laundromats. I’m sure a business that was more complex would have even more use for these tools
So you're part of the problem.
Sams business plan is the same and Michael Saylors with bitcoin. Corner the market by buying as much of the supply as possible to lock everyone else out.
Dirty Deeds…DONE WITH DRAM!!!
The greed has him. Lost cause now.
The upside to this bubble popping be I should be able to build a nice gaming rig for cheap.
How many times can one article shout that Samsung and SK Henix didn't know the other was making a deal. Jfc.
I hate him as much as others, but let's wait for a reliable source, Moore's Law Is Dead is basically a tabloid magazine of the Tech world
Part of the infinite money glitch. RAM manufacturers have to justify their AI investment, after all.
Complaining about high demand is misplaced anger. The real question is why can’t supply rise to meet demand?
Start looking into how the regulatory environment in the United States has made it nearly impossible for companies like Micron to increase their manufacturing footprint. That’s where you will find your real villains.
That's bullshit and you know it.
Samsung, Sk Hynix, and Micron aren't constructing additional fabs beyond what they've already committed to with their existing roadmaps because it is not in their economic best interest to do so in the long term. Regulations have absolutely nothing to do with it.
When the AI bubble pops (when, not if), all of those additional multi billion dollar facilities will have to be idled (probably right around the time they would be scheduled to come online) because consumer demand is not going to be high enough to justify their operation and there is going to be a massive oversupply of stock that will have to be essentially fire sold because the handful of companies that were buying it by the cargo container full are so overloaded with debt bankruptcy probably wouldn't keep them alive.
Additionally, they've started paying very close attention to some of the questions investors are asking the likes of Altman and have been left rather unimpressed because the responses to those questions have been 1) ignore them while amplifying hype and 2) privately seek out hundreds of billions in possible government bailouts.
Were I Samsung, Micron, Sk Hynix, or Kioxia, I wouldn't be willing to spend billions spinning up new fans at the behest of the gaggle of carnival barkers knocking on my door waving IOUs instead of actual money for future fulfillment as I see them implicitly admit they are turbo fucked the moment they can no longer sustain hype.
It’s not bullshit and you have no fucking clue what you are talking about
Micron is trying to build one of the largest fabs in the world specifically for DRAM in upstate New York. They have had the land and infrastructure secured for years but have yet to put a single shovel into the ground because of kafkaesque environmental regulations involving migratory bats from Canada.
https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factories-in-upstate-ny-delayed-by-two-to-three-years-company-says.html?outputType=amp
I guess reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.
I said they aren't willing to invest beyond their existing roadmaps. The facility you're prattling on about has been in the pipeline before the AI hype even really took off.
You know what that means?
It's existing capex, you donkey.
I honestly can’t even begin to understand what your point is. The world is in a massive RAM shortage. One of the largest RAM manufacturers in the world has been trying to build the largest RAM manufacturing facility in the world in America and it has been delayed by a solid 10 years due to regulatory nonsense.
What are you even arguing? That Micron isn’t investing beyond the things that they are very obviously investing in but can’t get built? Like that is your actual argument?
And? Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have either already started or have pledged to shift production away from DRAM and NAND to HBM because the margins are astronomically higher and the demand is nearly infinite. The DRAM and NAND flash production lines that haven't been shifted are having the majority of their wafers bought by a handful of companies attempting to deny each other access to those commodities even though none have the capacity to actually use even a fraction of them at present and arguably won't in the future (data centers packed floor to roof with servers aren't useful if the local gas, water, and electrical infrastructure can't support them).
And if it had come online it would have changed the current situation....how, exactly? Micron just killed off their Crucial brand and (repeating myself) said they will be shifting their production lines to higher margin products. Again, that's HBM. So your big, bad ass mega fab would still see its lines gradually getting pulled offline and retooled to make a type of product the average consumer, enterprise client, mobile device vendor, industrial hardware vendor, medical hardware vendor, and automotive manufacturer does not and cannot use. And just like with their competition, the pittance that would've been left for consumer hardware production would still have the lion's share being panic bought by dipshits like Altman 1 year/2 years before the ICs are even scheduled to be made.
Bitching about environmental and construction regulations ignores the reality of the situation we find ourselves in; you're can't satisfy near infinite demand when most of that demand actually comes from, "Fuck you, I'm buying this just so you can't have it!" and is being fueled by incomprehensible levels of debt that doesn't seem particularly concerned with ever being converted into profit. It also ignores the reality that memory vendors are very, very cautious about committing to the construction of new fabs to meet the demands of a new fad (that, again, investors are already starting to question) because having done just that in the past led to such massive gluts of inventory that they all had to idle production *for months* to keep the pricing from free falling into unprofitability.
They are moving out of commercial markets into higher margin business because they are output constrained! Is the average person seriously so fucking stupid now that they can’t connect these dots?
They would make more money if they could serve all markets. They can’t serve all markets because they can’t build enough fast enough so they prioritize the most profitable markets.
Demand is not infinite, that’s bullshit, and to the extent that certain companies are trying to corner the market on memory it’s because they correctly identified that companies like Micron were not going to be able to get long planned new fab online fast enough to meet demand. These two things are causally connected.
The environmental thing is not hypothetical. It is what is actually happening in New York with Micron’s flagship fab project. Five years of delays because of fucking migratory bats from Canada. That is a real thing that is happening. It should make people furious.
Jesus fucking...
The. Regulatory. Environment. You. Are. Bitching. About. Does. Not. Meaningfully. Impact. The. Matter. At. Hand.
It straight up doesn't. Micron could have encountered zero roadblocks building their fab and we'd be in the same fucking position we find ourselves now because the constraints would be exactly the same.
And the constraint is:
When you have a handful of companies willing to individually set fire to hundreds of billions of dollars trying to 1) chase construction targets and rollouts that are totally detached from reality and 2) desperately attempting to fuck each other over in the process, your actual capacity doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because the majority of those buyers have shown they aren't worried about taking on obscene debt to buy volume the picosecond it becomes available or to search it from someone else even if they literally have no other choice but to let their purchases collect dust in shipping containers for what might be years nor are they worried about fulfillment to the degree investors are becoming increasingly alarmed because 50-60% fulfillment just results in getting another dump truck of money to buy shit so far in advance the metals used to make it probably haven't been refined.
And since you have been through more than one boom/bust, you're a little apprehensive about expanding beyond your own roadmaps because, at some point, you know investors and creditors are going to start calling that debt, the infinite money glitch stops, and you'd be left with an excess of extremely capital intensive facilities that have to be kept operational in some capacity but with a fraction of the demand to justify their existence.
Micron could have built that mega fab and it would have resulted in no change because someone like Altman would be there with a checkbook asking, "What's your price for __% of your total global output?" just as has been done with Samsung and SK Hynix. And just like Sk Hynix and Samsung, they aren't keen on building beyond what they already said they would have for the reasons above even if you waved any and all regulations concerning their concentration.
You could will another 3 fabs into existence tomorrow with the Infinity Gauntlet as you sit on the shitter and all of their production into 2028 will have been secured in the time it takes you to pinch off a turd to the time it hits the water.
Oh no, we can't completely destroy the environment in the name of capitalism right fucking now. The horror.
This is literally the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever read.
Apparently when a good is shortage it’s impossible to relieve the shortage by building a lot more of it because infinite demand will immediately swallow it all up.
You are just making shit up and you are a fool.