He’s not wrong, it will take 3 to 5 years for anyone else to create competition. So he’s looking at milking the shortage for all it’s worth.
Of course, that assumes there aren’t major bankruptcies across the data center space, causing a lot of those contracts to be void. Like if a certain bubble were to burst over the next 12 to 18 months.
Watch Apple and their plan to use Chinese ram. It will be the real game changer.
Part of me wonders if this is the death of the personal computer, and weather or not it is planned.
I do think now and then there is a similar conspiracy, but I’ve started to realize that a lot of the people making these decisions are acting on very short term rewards, just like any asshole with a bag of chips that he wants to eat.
People generally want the good happy thing now, while they see it and know it’s ready for the taking. They don’t think about tomorrow. Corporate people at best think of this quarter’s profits, and how they can make this quarter look good. The quarter after is next quarter’s problem.
So the people selling shovels during the gold rush are laughing their ass off that everyone wants to dig holes, and producing as many shovels as they can to get as much money now as possible.
They will hire people to build more shovels, invest in equipment to increase supply, but not too much. Just enough to make more money now. Competition might come later, and that’s next year’s problem. Right now, they want to capitalize on a good situation as they see it.
I really don’t think they’re thinking so far ahead that they want to prevent people from owning personal computers. They know they don’t have enough pull to make decisions like that. If their market decisions right now lead to that, they don’t care and they will do it anyway, whatever makes more money now.
They would likely see that as a loss of customers too, not as centralizing power. Right now they just can’t meet consumer demand but they don’t give a shit about individuals, just that they’re making more money now than ever.
But now and then, I do think there’s weird evil fucking conspiracies run by corporations, but you should look at who lobbies government the most when you consider that. Tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry, big pharma. They do evil long term shit.
RAM developers, probably not yet, but AI, definitely.
In general I agree, but I’d put any conspiracy higher than AI, that’s just the scam de jour. It would be more along the lines of making conditions favourable for the death of personal computing and other boot on the face of humanity goals. It’s also likely this is a fairly natural evolution of late stage capitalism with technology, no conspiracy needed.
In this case it’s making lots and lots of GPU datacenters, which after a bubble pop will be useful for making compute a subscription for the masses and processing shittons of video feeds for the surveillance state, and the odd bit of AI.
This is why I don’t make much of the ‘the chips will be obsolete by the time they’re turned on’ argument, compute is compute, max efficiency or not. Obsolescence might sink a few (or many) companies, but the centralized compute assets will remain and need repurposing. Way too many of those purposes are harmful to the 99%.
naw
Sounds like a evil genius James Bond plot. Which means probably.
