As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

Posted by geox 12/28/2025

As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise(www.npr.org)

321 points | 513 commentspage 3

worik 12/29/2025|

    AI companies are spending billions of dollars constructing data centers at warp speed around the world. It's the reason why Gogia says the demand for these chips isn't just a cyclical blip.

That makes no sense, except in the very short term.

The Datacentre building going on is clearly cyclic, the start of a cycle, but still a cycle. There are finite requirements, finite money and finite tolerance for loss.

RAM lead in times to ramp up production are long, but also finite.

This will correct, again. Hopefully in the meantime we learn to do more with less, always an innovation engine

kotaKat 12/29/2025||

Does this mean developers will have to make their software work on hardware with 8GB of RAM and stop blindly assuming every person in the world gets a packed developer workstation like they do?

intrasight 12/29/2025|

In an idealized market economy that would be the case. But it is far from ideal. Your individual incentive as a SWE is to write more code.

corimaith 12/30/2025||

I always feel to place prices in context; Yes it does suck that 32gb DDR5 Ram is 300 dollars now, but comparatively a Magnus Pro XL table is $800 from the beginning. Furniture, Food, Clothes, etc are all at much higher marginal prices, its rather that PC building has been exceptionally cheap here. Are you really going to angrily shake your fist at society for that?

l9o 12/29/2025||

It feels like a weird tension: we worry about AI alignment but also want everyone to have unrestricted local AI hardware. Local compute means no guardrails, fine-tune for whatever you want.

Maybe the market pricing people out is accidentally doing what regulation couldn't? Concentrating AI where there's at least some oversight and accountability. Not sure if that's good or bad to be honest.

walterbell 12/29/2025||

> market pricing people out

For now. Chinese supply chains include DRAM from CXMT (sanctioned) and NAND from YMTC (not sanctioned, holds patents on 3D stacking that have been licensed by Korean memory manufacturers).

kasabali 12/29/2025||

They may not be sanctioned for selling, but they're sanctioned because they can't buy modern fab machinery.

ls612 12/29/2025||

The people who worry about “alignment” are very much not the same people who want anyone to have local AI hardware. They are the people who would force every computer legally allowed to be sold to the hoi polloi to be as locked down as an iPhone if they could.

emsign 12/29/2025||

Yeah, economic bubbles suck the life out of everything else. Imagine what tech doesn't get funding now because of this bet on LLMs.

xbmcuser 12/29/2025||

Might not be the best thing for US but rest of the world needs China to reach parity on node size with TSMC to crash the market.

racl101 12/29/2025||

I should probably buy a spare Logitech keyboard and mouse pair. Mine current ones are seeing wear and tear.

nospice 12/29/2025|

FWIW, these markets are largely separate. Keyboards and mice typically use relatively simple microcontrollers made at "yesteryear" node sizes (100 nm+), so they can't start making high-density DRAM or GPUs even if they wanted to.

estimator7292 12/31/2025||

At work we can't get DRAM chips. Micron stopped talking to us. We're looking to spend millions of dollars and nobody wants it.

It's insane.

abhi555shek 12/29/2025||

This is where government can jump in and take advantage of the less supply by opening large semi conductor factories quickly and helping people in avoiding this bottlneck.

wmf 12/29/2025|

Opening large semi conductor factories quickly isn't possible. Governments also can't stomach risking ~$20B.

kankerlijer 12/28/2025|

Well thank th FSM that the article opens right up with buy now! No thanks, I'm kind of burnt out on mindless consumerism, I'll go pot some plants or something.

johnea 12/28/2025|

I didn't see any of that.

I highly recommend disabling javascript in your browser.

Yes, it makes many sites "look funny", or maybe you have to scroll past a bunch of screen sized "faceplant" "twitverse" and "instamonetize" icons, but, there are far fewer ads (like none).

And of course some sites won't work at all. That's OK too, I just don't read them. If it's a news article, its almost always available on another site that doesn't require javascript.

piskov 12/29/2025|||

Probably using reader mode by default would be less guttural experience (and you’ll have an easy fallback).

intrasight 12/29/2025||

Used to work. No longer. What does work is archive.today. But even that is at risk. Some sites now presented encoded text when you view the archive.

zahlman 12/29/2025||||

I would not be able to handle that due to video streaming, web clients for things like email, etc. And some sites I trust (including HN) provide useful functionality with JS (while degrading gracefully).

But I use NoScript and it is definitely a big help.

metadope 12/29/2025|||

I whole-heartedly agree with your recommendation and join in encouraging more adopters of this philosophy and practice.

Life online without javascript is just better. I've noticed an increase in sites that are useful (readable) with javascript disabled. Better than 10 years ago, when broken sites were rampant. Though there are still the lazy ones that are just blank pages without their javascript crutch.

Maybe the hardware/resource austerity that seems to be upon us now will result in people and projects refactoring, losing some glitter and glam, getting lean. We can resolve to slim down, drop a few megs of bloat, use less ram and bandwidth. It's not a problem; it's an opportunity!

In any case, Happy New Year! [alpha preview release]

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