RAM makers are taking on massive debt to keep up with AI's chip appetite

[Endymio]

Right, look at what happened to crypto, only the crypto bros care about it anymore.
Sure AI does have its uses..

Comparing AI to crypto has to be the most astoundingly asinine argument of the day. Crypto has always had only two use cases: those under a highly unstable currency, and those engaging in acts that are illegal, but only so mildly illegal that it isn't worthwhile to detangle the blockchain and discover your identity.

AI, on the other hand, is literally transforming every industry on the planet. A decade from now, you'll have a panel of world-class specialist doctors monitoring your vitals in real time, 24x7, a team of security experts guarding you and your home, a cadre of financial advisors assisting every transaction, and a few home robots to perform all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and yardwork. You'll also be enjoying countless new technical and medical advances, from stronger, lighter, more durable materials to new, more effective drugs and medical treatments.

 

[Hecate91]

AI, on the other hand, is literally transforming every industry on the planet. A decade from now, you'll have a panel of world-class specialist doctors monitoring your vitals in real time, 24x7, a team of security experts guarding you and your home, a cadre of financial advisors assisting every transaction, and a few home robots to perform all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and yardwork.

Sounds great, if you love the idea of every dystopian novel or movie, in reality it'll be for the wealthy elites, and for the rest of humanity it'll mean you'll have no privacy with not even your own thoughts as some AI device would monitor your every emotion and thought and report you to the authorities for thought crimes.
Security will probably be needed for those who can still afford a home to protect themselves from the massive uprising that would happen after the economic collapse when the AI bubble pops leaving the average taxpayer to bail out the multi-trillion dollar corporations. Every transaction being monitored already happens, nothing good results from it when card processors are already bullying people on what they can or can't buy or sell.
And I don't see cooking or cleaning bots becoming affordable anytime soon, although it'll result in people being even more lazy.
Like I said, AI has it's uses, it does do some good for the medical industry, but datacenters consuming as much electricity as a whole state aren't needed, especially not while infrastructure doesn't exist for them to be built because they shouldn't be powered by coal or turbine engines causing further air and noise pollution. And not everyone wants Elysium or Cyberpunk to become a reality.

 

[Endymio]

Sounds great, if you love the idea of every dystopian novel or movie, in reality it'll be for the wealthy elites

Funny, you people raised the same objections over the invention of the automated loom, the steam engine, the factory, the internal combustion engine, electricity, computers, and the Internet. Yet the lower classes benefit the most from these innovations. In a few decades, AI is going to give you a standard a living that only the rich have today -- just as today's Middle Class live better than the kings of the Middle Ages.

Security will probably needed for those who can still afford a home to protect themselves from the massive uprising that would happen after the economic collapse when the AI bubble pops leaving the average taxpayer to bail out the multi-trillion dollar corporations.

Why not learn basic economics instead of spouting nonsense like this? Some AI firms will undoubtedly go bankrupt and you'll call that a "bubble" -- but even at the height of that collapse, the AI industry will still continue to grow and expand market penetration. Nor will those firms cause any sort of economic collapse ... as you yourself are fond of pointing out, these firms aren't employing massive numbers of workers.

And if you don't like huge bailouts, stop voting for liberal politicians that pass them. Obama's bailouts of Chrysler and GM didn't "save the US auto industry", it merely ensured those firms kept their monstrous union pension liabilties.

datacenters consuming as much electricity as a whole state aren't needed.

When those datacenters are generating more gross product than an entire state: yes they are needed.

 

[Rapob]

Economics would dictate that more ram factories be built to meet demand, however that isn't happening because the ram cartel wants to keep prices inflated, while they're also concerned that AI is a bubble. When the ram producers think AI is a bubble it should be obvious that AI isn't going to keep the billions being passed around or VC's funding AI companies forever.

Right, look at what happened to crypto, only the crypto bros care about it anymore.
Sure AI does have its uses, but the valid uses it has don't need datacenters consuming more electricity than an entire state.
The whole AI boom is unsustainable at the rate that the AI tech bros think things can progress, in reality, AI isn't smart and building more server farms isn't making LLMs any smarter.
Also how many of those orders are actually getting fulfilled?
Over half of datacenters being built are sitting empty because the chips to power servers, and the power grid infrastructure doesn't exist, it's a massive scam at this point because these datacenters simply aren't going to pay off.

Look at what happend to crypto, you mean hit the highest ever value late last year and climbing to hit new peaks in near future? I don't get it. BTC and ETH does fine really. I don't do much crypto anymore.

Nvidia beat expectations in Q2 again and future looks very very bright with orders for years pretty much.

It is funny how you can be in denial about reality. I work with datacenters and we have orders for the next many years lined up. I worked at both MS and Amazon ealier too. They build massive datacenters everywhere too.

Wake up and make dime, like me.

 

[Rapob]

Many have… and there’s plenty of power generation and water… don’t believe the nonsense you get in shock media…

When the AI rush ends, it will be because we have restored our supply chain and we’ll be able to construct as needed - and we’ll always need

"AI rush" will continue for 5-10 years. I literally laugh when people think AI peak right now.

Chip/Hardware demand will skyrocket in the next 5-10 years along with energy demand.

That is reality for you, just wait and see. Mark my words and think back on this post when it becomes reality x years from now.

Agentic AI will require massively more computing power and energy, this is the goal with AI. We are not even close.

It is early days for AI. I said this several years ago, even back then, people talked about bubbles and crashes. These people missed out on huge gains and still pray for a crash, while market beats expectations every quarter still.

Nvidia just beat estimations in Q2 as well, and these expectations were high to begin with. Demand is massive and Rubin is not even out yet. Production is the biggest problem today, hence why they build fabs left and right. Nvidia and partners have orders for several years lined up.

Demand won't go down from here, only grow. You'll see.

 

[Rapob]

Considering the amount of news posts about hyperscalers having more cards than data centers and data centers being build faster than the energy providers/net can be scaled up chip production seems to have somewhat stopped being the one singular bottleneck.


Ehhhh
Absolutely no sign of a bubble is something you won't even hear Sam Altman say. In fact, even he stated it's a bubble.
We won't know for sure until/if that that demand vanishes overnight if it is a bubble or not but I'm definitely leaning towards yes. Every study points out that the amount of companies actually making profit after implementing AI is actually stuck with higher costs with often times little to no benefit - or worse a decline in quality/productivity.

We're very much still in the all we have is a hammer and everything looks like a nail phase. AI is being thrown willy nilly at every sector in every possible form to see what works and the answer so far overwhelmingly seems to be - it doesn't.
I'm very much expecting a strong analog to the dot com bubble where eventually a few companies come out on top but a great many go under (Google will be fine, but will OpenAI? Will the companies that offer little more than a thin wrapper around existing models?). We'd need actual AI to take the baton and keep running because LLMs aren't the solution to everything.

Demand to vanish overnight? Haha! Explain to me, how this would happen? The only thing that would make that scenario happen, is if WW3 breaks out - Nuclear war pretty much and then we probably have other problems that Tech / AI sector crashing.

Sam Altman became a billionaire thanks to AI. Without AI he would be a nobody. He is still massively invested in AI and tech, what he says and what he does is two different things.

 

[Rapob]

Comparing AI to crypto has to be the most astoundingly asinine argument of the day. Crypto has always had only two use cases: those under a highly unstable currency, and those engaging in acts that are illegal, but only so mildly illegal that it isn't worthwhile to detangle the blockchain and discover your identity.

AI, on the other hand, is literally transforming every industry on the planet. A decade from now, you'll have a panel of world-class specialist doctors monitoring your vitals in real time, 24x7, a team of security experts guarding you and your home, a cadre of financial advisors assisting every transaction, and a few home robots to perform all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and yardwork. You'll also be enjoying countless new technical and medical advances, from stronger, lighter, more durable materials to new, more effective drugs and medical treatments.

You are right. Many people underestimate how important AI will become in the future. Agentic AI could potentially discover cures for diseases that humans have struggled with for decades, even centuries.

From this point on, significant progress will likely depend heavily on advancements in AI.

The human brain has reached its limits. We are now in a period of stagnation.

AI will play a vital role in the future of mankind.

This may sound like science fiction, but it’s just reality. Humans have not invented anything truly groundbreaking in years, except AI. We need AI to make the next major technological leaps. Agentic AI that is.

Humans are still, in many ways, cave people, now with smartphones and internet. We still live and think as if we were surviving in the wild. Our goal is to move beyond this planet, and that will not happen without AI.

Humans must colonize space, or we may eventually cease to exist.

AI is the most important invention since electricity. Now humans actually have a chance of being a tier 1 civilization in the next 100 years. Without AI, not a chance.

So here you have it people, AI is more important than cheap consumer hardware. Hoping for AI bubble to burst, so you can buy cheap consumer hardware again, is painfully stupid.

 

[Tech420]

There won't be any crash, as we need massive amount of chips in the next 10 years, probably forever from here. We also need 10 times the energy.

Even with all the upcoming fabrication facilities, we will lack chip production.

They should lease the space from existing chip producers. I see Lays plain flavor chips on the shelves rarely sell and I don't think I've ever bought that flavor (mostly prefer their bbq) and those plants are huge. They can save a lot of money and retrofit those plants to build better chips that people actually want without having to expand their own buildings

 

[agentnate009]

HDD factories vs chip factories are apples and oranges... HDD tech is obsolete - but because of how expensive SSDs are, they remain the cost-effective way to have mass storage. Obviously, a company would be hesitant to commit long term to making tons of them (but I'd wager they'll stick around for at least 10 years).

Chip factories are different - we'll ALWAYS need chips! What gets manufactured in each fab changes as tech does - but they are far easier to commit to long term.

HDDs will be around for longer than 10 years, massive cost savings per GB versus SSDs. I read an article lasts year about it, HDDs are not going anywhere. In fact, they have found a way to speed them up to SATA SSD bandwidth levels, which is a huge step up from where they have been hanging out for years in terms of data transfer capability. HDDs are still cost effective storage solutions for data centers that don't need speed.

 

[Squid Surprise]

HDDs will be around for longer than 10 years, massive cost savings per GB versus SSDs. I read an article lasts year about it, HDDs are not going anywhere. In fact, they have found a way to speed them up to SATA SSD bandwidth levels, which is a huge step up from where they have been hanging out for years in terms of data transfer capability. HDDs are still cost effective storage solutions for data centers that don't need speed.

I did say "at least" 10 years... no one can really predict what will happen beyond that - but yes, I don't see them going anywhere any time soon...

 

[trents]

I'm hoping this will spur development in operating systems and apps that are more memory efficient. For lots of years, efficiency in coding was thrown to the wind because RAM was so cheap. Now that throwing more memory into the equation in order to mask coding inefficiency is cost prohibitive, maybe developers will begin to look at it more seriously from the other end. And perhaps AI itself could be of assistance in this matter.

 

[user556]

... And perhaps AI itself could be of assistance in this matter.

LLMs are known to create copious bloat. Great at bringing any system to a crawl.