• Greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 day ago

    Its by design, I swear. They don’t have anywhere to run any of this gear, its all piling up somewhere.

    Either that or it doesn’t exist and what we’re seeing is price gouging based on hypothetical demand based off of “letters of intent” that aren’t actually worth the paper they’re written on.

    I think its the latter.

    • Leon@pawb.social
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      24 hours ago

      It’s definitely the latter. These are writing contracts to buy hardware that has yet to be produced for data centres that haven’t been built. All so they can satisfy a demand that doesn’t yet exist for a product no one is going to be willing to pay for.

      It will crash. This whole grift is too expensive to keep going. The naysayers keep forgetting that hardware gets old, it wears out and fails, and gets superseded by newer models. The chip makers are riding high now because the idiotic belief of the market is that this will keep growing as the data centres keep being built and the AI companies will keep buying new hardware.

      It just can’t. This candle is burning fast at both ends.

    • Jul (they/she)@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      22 hours ago

      Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven’t actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.

      Hopefully the bubble pops soon, though I hate that Americans’ 401Ks and IRAs will take the brunt of the “losses” when it does.

      • ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 hours ago

        Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven’t actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.

        This is exceedingly normal procedure for manufacturing companies, and not limited to tech industry by any means. They know how much they can potentially produce on their lines, if they have predicted customers to fulfill the capacity for a full year they are basically sold out despite not having produced most of it yet.

        The company I work for also has “sold out” for several of our factories because we have orders for 110% production capacity on them. Orders are not paid up front, they never are in any industry, it’s always paid after delivery usually with a 30-90 days delay (and even more in some cases).

        There is nothing spectacularly weird or out of place in the announcement they’ve made, it’s basically standard procedure.

        • Jul (they/she)@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          5 hours ago

          Yeah, the issue is that it drove up the price to justify price-gouging even though it’s likely these won’t actually get purchased. They shouldn’t reserve nearly all of their product for pending transactions. They should fulfill actual demand before theoretical ones. This is clearly only possible because of the industry consolidation into essentially a monopoly. If they still had real competitors, they’d have to actually sell for a fair price and they’d be concerned that they likely won’t get paid for these “reservations”.

      • Greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org
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        21 hours ago

        The whole thing is speculation because its based off the back of letters of intent, no real contracts for anything. Its all still, currently, smoke and mirrors until something is inked and someone gets paid (or atleast, finance agreed)

        So right now, we’re watching bullshit speculators sink the market. And/or restricted supply being used to milk us like cows.

    • Elting@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      If people refuse to pay the prices and use their products then eventually they will run out of money and credit to do so.

    • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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      23 hours ago

      It’s the components that make up these things that’s being bought to make data center hardware. They never make it to the consumer product factory.

      • Greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org
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        21 hours ago

        Uhhuh so they’re tooling up to make devices for a company that wont exist soon for datacenters that have no power.

        All that shit is going in the landfill and they will be desperately repackaging HBM into consumer products. Bet.