I think it's interesting that no one has mentioned that this much purchasing power concentrated in the oligarchs in the first place is its own problem.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
204 points (99.5% liked)
Hardware
754 readers
5 users here now
A community for news and discussion about the hardware side of technology. Questions and support posts are also welcome, so long as they are relevant to hardware and interesting technologies therein.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It is actually the whole problem.
Oligarchs have too much money in a world that's already edging to end of abundant resources, but they absolutely want to see their wealth keep growing as if it could go on indefinitely. Tüey already squeezed workers and taxes, there is not much more margin there. There is pretty much no business left that can promise past returns, except single shots based on governments corruption.
Being not half as smart as they think they are, they got conned by AI startup pitches about giganormic growth opportunities, and poured a shit ton of money on them. Now the con-men need to entertain them for as long as they can to suck them as much as they can.
Everybody else is paying the price.
Oligarchs are just as dumb as any random person. They shouldn't exist to start with. No one deserve is worth much money and worthy of the power it grants.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that is what they originally intended. As always it is just trillion dollar corporations chasing shortsighted profits, they are incapable of making such long term plans.
But that is definitely what they are going to pivot towards when the AI bubble bursts. That will keep the data center circle jerk running for a while longer.
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?
Chinese manufacturers would fall outside of the "circlejerk" economy between hardware manufacturers and AI companies, and as such I think AI companies would be less willing to buy from Chinese manufacturers, particularly with Trumpian anti-China policies.
Even if they didn't, Chinese companies still seem to very much be old-school capitalism - they actually still concentrate on making and selling a product instead of just moving capital around with the customer being an obstacle and excuse.
Chinese companies still seem to very much be old-school capitalism - they actually still concentrate on making and selling a product instead of just moving capital around with the customer being an obstacle and excuse.
This seems very plausible. But I still don't see what is stopping the AI companies to create proxies to buy out as much of the usable product as possible, maybe only leaving DDR3 and older stuff, so while we will still have the chance to buy it, it will still end up being pretty expensive.
Well, the purchases they make now from western companies is an incestuous "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" on-paper only revenue scam.
Chinese companies would not play ball with that, because for better or worse, China has a MUCH stronger will to rip a company apart if it's behaving irresponsibly, particularly if that irresponsibility is strengthening US companies' hands. So buying from NVidia means market manipulation and ulterior motives for ledgers and stock prices. Buying from a Chinese company means buying the product at something more like a fair market price rather than sweetheart deals, and then also fighting a US government that is actively fighting Chinese chip production and willing to use tariffs and strongarming to enforce it.
I'm not saying this is exactly how this will shake out, but I am saying it's the only potential place that computer technology has ANY chance of being made for consumers for the next decade or so, so it's them or nothing.
Hopefully it does turn out like that until the AI Co.s get what's coming to them.
Though the same thing will be coming to all of us and I am assuming they are the ones who will get the bailout.
Again, as per Gamers Nexus the Chinese manufacturers have been mandated to prioritise a majority of their production to Chinese data centers, because the Chinese government has its own AI dreams.
They are not going to be the salvation of the consumers.
The hardware bought by a company can't be bought and used by the competitor.
And "computing power" is... power.
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.
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
As per Gamers Nexus the Chinese RAM manufacturers have been mandated by the Chinese government to prioritise the majority of their production to data centers now though. The Chinese government has its own AI dreams.
So no, they care as little about consumers as the rest of them.
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.
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.
Relying on a fascist to stop fascism is just plain stupid.
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.
All this, so some guys can dream becoming millionaires by posting AI slop onto social media in the hopes of more ad revenue.
These short sighted fools are only buying 100% of what computing components being made in the next few years. I've claimed the entire production output of the human race for the next 10,000 years. Get good
It's not so much about being short-sighted as being greedy con-artists: the longer they maintain the illusion AI will eventually work and be profitable, the more money in their own pocket.
They stopped at one year to keep investors on that thin line between a state of too much confidence so they stop investing more and say they poured enough money for AI companies to break even, and the state where they lose hope and cut their losses.
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.
Every tech bro is middle aged. AI is their midlife crisis. They are willing to burn the world to the ground for a chance to live forever. Police state cementing their power and ridding themselves of the middle class are just perks.
As far as I know every major AI company has trans humanists roots.. Every tech bro is drinking some form of the TESCREAL KOOL aid.
Listen to the NYT interview with Peter Thiel where he proclaims Full Trans as in transhuman is good. It's only half trans as in transsexual that is bad. In the same interview he hesitates to answer whether the total extinction of the human race would be a bad thing.
None of this is hidden and they really aren't shy about saying it.
Here is a link to the Thiel interview. https://sfl.media/peter-thiels-complete-interview-with-the-new-york-times/
Cisco sent out a similar email, and I know firsthand Supermicro is doing the same as we've already had a huge order get a price increase AFTER placing it, and we fully expect to see another one before the whole thing ships. It's a shit show right now.
but it is worth all "the cat making latte videos" isn't it?
So the ultra rich can buy it all for cheap.