Posted by geox 12/28/2025
Steam engines, electricity, computers displaced workers but spawned far more opportunities through new industries and cheaper goods. Same pattern now.
The "jobless masses stuck with 1GB phones eating slop" fantasy is backwards. Compute keeps getting vastly cheaper and more capable; AI speeds that up.
"Terrible for indie creators and startups"? The opposite: AI obliterates barriers to building, shipping, and competing. Solo founders are moving faster than ever.
It's the same tired doomer script we get with every tech wave. It ages poorly.
???
Nah. The demand is driven by corporations that hoard hardware in datacenters, starving the market and increasing prices in the process - otherwise known as scalping. Then they sell you back that same hardware, in the form of cloud services, for even higher prices.
More explanations here:
A bunch of problems pop up when a handful of super wealthy corporations can control markets.
Calling this "scalping" is just economically illiterate conspiracy theorizing.
> And in the process of doing so they're providing a hugely valuable service
The value is in the hardware itself, the added services aren't essential - just packaging. The GPU scalpers also sell "a hugely valuable" product, but that has nothing to do with anything, manipulating supply for a price differential is what matters.
> Calling this "scalping" is just economically illiterate conspiracy theorizing.
Scalping is not a conspiracy, it's a well known fact observed since antiquity. Conspiracy or the lack of it thereof aren't among my concerns, the economic fundamentals enabling that phenomenon are.
You're just "trying to make fetch happen". Stop trying to make fetch happen, Gretchen, because nobody else thinks it's scalping.
There are multiple RAM providers. Datacenters, many competing ones, are gobbling up RAM because there is currently a huge demand. And, unlike actual ticket scalpers, datacenters perform a very valuable service beyond just reselling the RAM. After all, end users could buy up RAM and GPUs themselves and build their own systems (which is basically what everybody did as recently as the early 00s), but they'd rather rent it because it's much less risky with much less capex.
This is simply run-of-the-mill supply and demand. You might convince me there was something nefarious if there was widespread collusion or monopoly abuse, and while some of the circular dealing is worrisome, it's still a robust market with multiple suppliers and multiple competitors in the datacenter space.
That's definitely NOT run-of-the-mill demand because it comes from companies buying hardware at operating loss, which can only be recouped by scalping higher prices at the expense of a starved market.
Demand funded by circular financial agreements and off-the-book debt isn't "run-of-the-mill" by any stretch.
Another way to think about it is a good that we once bought for private use where it sat around underutilized the majority of the time is instead being allocated in data centers where we rent slices of it, allowing RAM to be more efficiently allocated and used.
Yes it sucks that demand for RAM has led to scarcity and higher prices but those resources moving to data centers is a natural consequence of a shareable resource becoming expensive. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy.
The goal seems to be to squash the proliferation of open source LLMs and prevent individuals from running private, uncensored models at home. It is an effective way to kill any possible underdog or startup competition by making the "barrier to entry" (the compute) a rented privilege rather than a private resource. The partnership with Palantir seems to point directly to this, especially considering the ideologies of Thiel and Karp.
They are building a world where intelligence is centralized and monitored, and local sovereignty over AI is treated as a liability to be phased out
Presumably the boom times are the main reason why investment goes into it so that years later, consumers can buy for cheap.