Technology

If it bursts, that is. I have a fear that people behind AI have grown so savvy of the bubbles, that they have a complicated plan to avoid it, and artificially uphold it with the help of bribed/blackmailed politicians.

They've gone so far as to claim responsibility.

We can only hope that their businesses crash hard before any of these deals come to fruition and then when the hardware has nowhere to go we can all "buy the dip" so to speak.

To be clear, I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware, but hopefully it all crashing down will help get more people into self-hosting and working on community resources and networks instead of having everything live in the cloud.

Western Digital chief Tiang Yew Tan told analysts "We're pretty much sold out for calendar '26. We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers."

the dow is 50k and 37% of the market is made up of those seven

freaking financial human centipede

These companies are publicly traded...

The people who run/own the AI companies would have been complete idiots to not invest in the hardware companies they were going to make these purchases from before making those purchases.

But 100 million in Seagate stock, then announce you just signed a contract buying up supply.

Your company may overpay, but you personally just made a shit ton of money. Which is the why you want your company to succeed

As a bonus, the news that you're overpaying to buy up all the hard drives, doesn't hurt your company it helps it.

There's no way to monetize it anyways, the product is the stock price. And this move makes the company seem confident, which raises stock price.

That's not even getting into the long term problem that even if AI fails, were seeing a huge migration in computing power from individuals to private corporations. That's a big deal even if AI dies tomorrow. And they have a lot of motivation to never let us get it back.

I got a 16TB HDD for 300€, yesterday I looked at it and it was 800€ (apparently discounted from 1000€ lol)

Same. Scored two 16TB drives and a 4GB in summer of 2025 (by pure chance though). They're now 150%-200% the original price. Cannot wait to see this bubble pop.

These sound like great ideas. Additionally, I find that making the most of the hardware I already have can be really satisfying, too.

Hardware will be available, silly. ^†^

You will have the "freedom" ^‡^ to choose from the hardware vendor* you want. Like always! ^‡‡^

^†^ ^For^ ^$49.95^ ^per^ ^month.^

^Terms and conditions and government social score apply.^

^‡‡^ ^Authorized and approved by the department of national security and intelligence gathering agencies and the billionaire technofascist bros clubh^

that's okay they will replace users with AI. it's going to be AI all the way down

I doubt offering AI services to the public is their goal.

I bought 2 8TB drives last week and had to check if they were still in stock at the same retailer and they are, but the price have gone up with 23%...

I'm guessing you got similar drives to the ones I got. I paid ~$72 each (4x 12TB), and now the same HGST DC drives from the same seller are $220. Just glad I got them when I did, even though now I have to continually prune the data so it all fits within this forever limit.

Good idea. I just looked at a drive I bought six months ago and it's up 40% or so. Wish I'd have got two now.

Bought a 20 TB external for ~$270 a few months ago. It's now $400:

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B09VCXWPQG

Honestly which companies does that leave?

Less skynet and more a surveillance state thats gonna put England and even CCP to shame.

They need the hard drives because they're storing everything about us. Every time we drive by a camera, gps paths of our cell phones constant travel, every bank transaction including small purchases, every social media comment, page we view from WiFi or cellphone, all our connections to everyone else, tags for various groups.

Not even just the people we know we know, they'll know who's usually next to us in traffic on commutes and when, who makes our sandwich from the deli we go to every other Tuesday, what cops would be most likely to respond to a call to our house at a certain time...

Like, "skynet" is useful because everyone knows the term.

The real danger is what humans will do with access to that much information on everyone, and what a normal human would do to/for a stranger to protect all their darkest secrets.

Imagine if tech was 20 years ahead right now with trump in office, do you think someone like him would hesitate to start wide scale blackmail?

You think they're above telling a couple thousand people in highly targeted districts that they had to vote a certain a way or else?

It's not the AI we need to be scared of, it's the data.