This could go on for another 10 years.
And the only ones that will actually grow are Chinese companies that dont rely on western owned semiconductor fabs. Kind of odd that none of the “national security” idiots in the US have started ringing the alarms about this yet. At this point China will fully catch up (at least in terms of RAM manufacturing) in just a few years and eat up the entire consumer segment.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/chinas-cxmt-and-ymtc-to-expand-memory-output
Kind of odd that none of the “national security” idiots in the US have started ringing the alarms about this yet.
… because they are in on it.
eat up the entire consumer segment
Won’t AI companies just fill enough orders to empty all that extra produce?
Won’t AI companies just fill enough orders to empty all that extra produce?
Depends on whether China is interested in helping to build western datacenters. If big Xi says “no selling to US military contractors” (which all big AI companies are) then that is how its gonna be.
But then they would also have to stop selling to other companies outside, because they could just have pipes to said AI companies.
If its true that …
Many consumer electronics manufacturers ‘will go bankrupt’ by the end of 2026 thanks to the RAMpocalypse
… then im sure that lots of those companies will be more than willing to make restrictive deals with these chinese manufacturers to save themselves. If they violate the conditions of those deals they can get cut off and be forced to go bankrupt again.
There are quite a few other things that can happen over here.
Since terminals are still required even if all work is done in the data centres, those companies can now get deals with other AI companies to normally provide devices to them. Or those companies can just normally buy those things off of the distributors. This can in turn greatly increase commodity laptop/desktop prices for us.
US can try “helping” Taiwan and threaten Xi with that, to relax their laws for said companies.
Finally, the governments can start requisitioning computing hardware from us. Honestly, I am just counting my days until this, despite the recent govt. chip making progress.
Yeah not just purely consumer manufacturers, some of the business manufacturers as well. Just the other day I got a newsletter from HPE with the subject “HPE Supply Constraints Update” which was pretty shocking tbh. They are changing the way quotes work and reserve the right to change prices at any moment for longer running orders. And they reserve the right to cancel any order at any time for whatever reason to “provide maximum flexibility in these unprecedented times”. They also point to HPE Financial Services and their refurb products.
Many companies are hurting hard, prices fluctuate too much for them to react to properly. For 2026 many of the models were already built or the hardware required reserved, but as those run out this year, it will be hard for them to have any kind of 2027 line-up. A lot of people in the industry are fearing the entire thing might collapse somewhere this year or next year.
With all those huge orders for servers and datacenters, a lot of the regular supply chain is bypassed, so nobody is making any money on that except for a select few companies (for example Nvidia and Foxconn). At the same time there is little to none availability for either finished products or the raw materials (mainly chips and copper) to build new stuff.
None of this makes any sense unless there is some super secret versions of these AI that they’re holding back from the public. Nothing about the current models is what they claim it to be. Its a useful tool, sure, but its really only as useful as the skill of the operators, and I don’t mean “prompt engineer” or whatever other bullshit you call that. I mean actually developers and engineers who have had the time in the trenches to know what is going to work or not work.
Use AI to generate a codebase for an app. Get to an MVP. Then, try and make a change. I dare you to. Its a fucking disaster. These models are not up to the task. Its a structural issue. They have no conception of how things fit together. They’re constantly just making shit up whole-cloth, and beyond that, they’re just gaslighting you to sound smarter than they are.
They can be used to make demos. They can be used to solve already solved, well trodden problems. But thats really about it. You’ll spend 4 hours trying to get it to change one basic component. They’re exponentiating the amount of calories burned, but not the amount of work done.
The hardware bought by a company can’t be bought and used by the competitor.
And “computing power” is… power.
It’s a grift, nothing more. The execs know this, but they want new yachts.
Thats what I think. If they had the super secret “next best thing”, they’d be pumping it for all its worth. The models themselves have felt asymptoted since 4.0. The engineering around those models has improved, but the underlying models haven’t.
There is also a hanging chad around alignment. There was much-ado when I think it was 4.0 or 3.5, around some jailbreaks. Everytime a jailbreak got fixed, the models got worse.
What are the chances that this is orchestrated to bring more computing control to the larger companies who can weather the storm? If end users don’t have ram or storage that will make it even easier to push them into walled garden cloud platforms.
The only hope for consumers is that Chinese manufacturers pick up the slack, but guess which country western governments ABSOLUTELY don’t want you buying products from?
How much would it matter?
Even if they are Chinese manufacturers, they would want to go with the high-price buyer, which is larger companies.
And if they do keep some reserve for people, out of some long-term-thought or maybe just some morals, wouldn’t they just prefer selling inside China?
Starting to look like that honestly
Edit: and they probably like the AI is flooding the open source market with shitty code and PR that can make it hard to know which projects/PR actually is actually done through human efforts for the betterment of the society
Yeah, they went all in on sabotaging the competition. Using their freely given product to destroy them.
Then, try and make a change. I dare you to. Its a fucking disaster.
You are correct, and now the emerging strategy is to just “re-roll” the entire codebase any time a change is needed. It’s insane.
