this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Yeah that's happened before, with both memory and hard drives. A flood in Thailand caused HDD shortages and price spikes for a year or two around 2012, and there was a similar situation with DRAM some years earlier. There have also been GPU and SSD shortages due to cryptocurrency idiots. This may just be more of the same.
This time is different because the chip fabs intentionally retooled for AI chips. It's not an uncontrollable external pressure.
There's no guarantee that they'll switch back to consumer modules after the bubble pops. I'm willing to bet that Big Tech's contingency plan to the pop is to utilize a dead consumer market to push subscription based virtual desktops and zero clients.
At least one major manufacturer also outright pulled out of the consumer market entirely. There's no guarantee that they'll come back, or else they would have just kept the consumer arm.
The GPU shortage may have ended but the crazy prices never really went away
Because as the crypto demand ended, the AI demand for high end gpus rose
There was some time in between actually
And prices settled a bit during those few months.
In capitalism, if the demand is outstripping supply then eventually higher prices will command greater investment and the eventual return to normalcy of the supply vs demand curve. In theory it is more of the same, but how prolonged it will be will be dependent on when the AI supply/demand curve achieves normalcy.
Unfortunately besides chips, another huge input to this AI crap is electric power, which is coming mostly from expanding fossil fuel consumption and thus increasing planetary heating. Economists' intersecting curves are of no help with that.
Some of the shortages have been due to supply interruptions, like the hard drive factory getting flooded, or similarly with a DRAM factory catching on fire. I don't know what happened after the Chia lunacy (Chia was a crypto currency that consumed vast amounts of SSD space and destroyed the SSD's through extreme write wear) but prices did normalize after a while. I know that Chia was the final straw that got Hetzner to ban crypto mining on its hardware outright. Previously, it was forbidden on VPS's but allowed on dedicated servers. Anyway it caused a temporary shortage of both SSD and hard drives.