this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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[–] ulterno@programming.dev 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

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?

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

There's also Chinese datacenters. China will be wanting to compete without depending on foreign companies. And apparently the Chinese companies have been ordered to prioritize sales to datacenters. Plus Apple is talking to them about a potential deal, so the changes of us peasants getting RAM that way seem slim too.

The only thing that might help is an AI crash, but that will cause a massive ripple of economic damage so none of us will have any money to buy RAM anyway.

[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Relying on a fascist to stop fascism is just plain stupid.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But then they would also have to stop selling to other companies outside, because they could just have pipes to said AI companies.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago

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.