Posted by mossTechnician 1/7/2026
I think a lot of the hardware of these "AI" servers will rather get re-purposes for more "ordinary" cloud applications. So I don't think your scenario will happen.
Consumer PCs and hardware are going to be expensive in 2026 and AI is primarily to blame. You can find examples of CEOs talking about buying up hardware for AI without having a datacenter to run it in. This run on hardware will ultimately drive hardware prices up everywhere.
The knock on effect is that hardware manufacturers are likely going to spend less money doing R&D for consumer level hardware. Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars making a 700 core beast for AI workloads in a datacenter? And you can get a nice premium for that product because every AI company is fighting to get any hardware right now.
You might be right, but I suspect not. While the hardware company are willing to do without laptop sales, data centers need the power efficiency as well.
Facebook has (well had - this was ~10 years ago when I heard it) a team of engineers making their core code faster because in some places a 0.1% speed improvement across all their servers results in saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month (sources won't give real numbers but reading between the lines this seems about right) on the power bill. Hardware that can do more with less power thus pays for itself very fast in the data center.
Also cooling chips internally is often a limit of speed, so if you can make your chip just a little more efficient it can do more. Many CPUs will disable parts of the CPU not in use just to save that heat, if you can use more of the CPU that translates to more work done and in turn makes you better than the competition.
Of course the work must be done, so data centers will sometimes have to settle for whatever they can get. Still they are always looking for faster chips that use less power because that will show up on the bottom line very fast.
At CES this year, one of the things that was noted was that "AI" was not being pushed so much as the product, but "things with AI" or "things powered by AI".
This change in messaging seems to be aligning with other macro movements around AI in the public zeitgeist (as AI continues to later phases of the hyper curve) that the companies' who've gone all-in on AI are struggling to adapt to.
The end-state is to be seen, but it's clear that the present technology around AI has utility, but doesn't seem to have enough utility to lift off the hype curve on an continuously upward slope.
Dell is figuring this out, Microsoft is seeing it in their own metrics, Apple and AWS has more or less dipped toes in the pool...I'd wager that we'll see some wild things in the next few years as these big bets unravel into more prosaic approaches that are more realistically aligned with the utility AI is actually providing.
Do consumers understand that OEM device price increases are due to AI-induced memory price spike over 100%?
(I mean, obviously there is no sinister robot god, but if there were you’d expect it to be keen on the production of wasteful/unlikely-to-be-used AI substrate.)
Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Premium, Dell _Pro_ Premium Dell Max, Dell _Pro_ max... They went and added capacitive keys on the XPS? Why would you do this...
A lot of decisions that do not make sense to me.
Sure, the original numbering system did make sense, but you had to Google what the system meant. Now, it's kind of intuitive, even though the it's just a different permutation of the same words?
I've shied away from Dell for a bit because I had two XPS 15's that had swelling batteries. But the new machines look pretty sweet!
Consumers consciously choosing to play games - or serious CAD/image/video editing - usually note they will want a better GPU.
Consumers consciously choosing to use AI/llm? That's a subscription to the main players.
I personally would like to run local llm. But this is far from a mainstream view and what counts as an AI PC now isn't going to cut it.
Hence the large percentage of Youtube ads I saw being "with a Dell AI PC, powered by Intel..." here are some lies.
But we've been there before. Computers are going to get faster for cheaper, and LLMs are going to be more optimized, cause right now, they do a ton of useless calculations for sure.
There's a market, just not right now.