this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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The irony is as they bid up the price of all the hardware, they are probably making their AI platforms more likely to fail due to being more expensive than their value.
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.
I'm currently hosting everything on old desktop PCs and SBCs but fuck it, I'll swipe some closeout hardware and upgrade to a proper server rack.
In a similar boat, I've thought about that but if I ever upgraded to a stronger real centralized PC I'd have to do a bunch of Docker setup and if anything breaks my whole system would go down. As it is, with piecemeal shitass laptops each running individual services I get lots of redundancy!
Definitely same.
it actually won't be, at least not for the hard drives. the prevailing strategy for quite some time now is to just use the cheapest available disks and deal with the failures on the software level. those disks will ultimately fail anyway and the increased price for some super-duper enterprise reliability server disk is not really worth it.
the dow is 50k and 37% of the market is made up of those seven
freaking financial human centipede
I can't wait for it to crash and burn, this bubble is getting so ridiculous.
🎈📌
that crash and burn will be the onus of the consumer not being able to consume.
we will lose access to free range computing and have to live with asking AI for permission to use the computing power and network resources to play a game or pay our bills online. And paytoll for that permission.
that will be the crash and burn victims here.
It needs to crash. If it doesn't crash soon, things will only get worse and worse for consumers. We're already over the edge of the cliff (imo), it's just a matter of how far we have to fall now. If it crashes hard enough, we won't have to live with "asking AI for permission to use the computing platform". By the way, an LLM isn't really capable of that at the moment, and the sooner it crashes, the less likely anything like that will happen.
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.
This is illegal but I'm sure it happens all the time.
Yeah, that's how politicians get the insider tips, it's bribes to not go after the person who gave them the tip.
If enough of the right people make enough money, then everything about it becomes legal, or at worse a fine that's less than the profits made.