this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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It's not really artificial scarcity, there is actually less consumer hardware available at the moment.
The underlying issue is that companies are selling ML hardware that doesn't exist to data centres that do not exist, which have demand that does not exist. I call it artificial scarcity because there is no beneficiary at the end of this chain. It's money that basically goes around in a circle between oligarchs, they play hot potato as if it were NFTs. And of course, Nvidia, AMD and Intel are very happy to sell to lunatics who think their data center is a goldmine, as Jensen puts it frequently. In a Gold Rush, only shovel salesmen make money.
Scarcity applies to the things that actually exist, or not.
There are fewer graphics cards being made for consumers right now than there were a few years ago, and they have less memory on them on average.
.. because of datacenters that don't exist for demand that isn't there.
Someone is buying every single chip that SK Hynix and Nvidia are producing. The fabs they're using are all running at maximum capacity.
Those chips are going somewhere.
... for no good reason.
The scarcity isn't artificial though. The actual objects are not available in the quantities needed to keep prices level.
The reasoning for that matters not at all.