What if the unintentional consequence of hardware hoarding by AI companies is we have fewer devices being made that spy on us, like smart TVs and appliances.
this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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. . . And then the market will be flooded with RAM that companies preordered and can't pay for, because the AI bubble burst before it could be manufactured.
Hey, I can dream, right? And seriously, I would be quite happy if this causes an increase in dumb appliances, devices, and cars in the meanwhile.
Most of the lithography that is dedicated to RAM is being done for HBM modules, which are not consumer grade. So more likely it will end up in landfills.
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When the bubble bursts it will play out exactly the same as it always does. The government will use money it doesn't have to bail out the too-big-to-fail companies causing runaway inflation, rates will be jacked up to bring inflation down causing a recession, we will all get laid off, and by the time everything starts to stabilize and we have disposable income something will happen to make prices untenable again.
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I'd just point out that now might be a good time to add a whole-house surge arrester and/or get a bunch of new surge arresting power strips for your hardware. They have a useful life measured in joules dissipated so replace them if they're old too or your cheap RAM (among other things) may let out the magic smoke one day.
I took the plunge last month and went with 32GB 6000MT/s DDR5 in a new system. 16GB VRAM card, too.
We'll see if this system will hold up for as long as my old pc did, which was 10 years.
Look at mister millionaire over here!
That is ok we will get more videos of cats making lattes.
Go Go Gadget zswap!
"everything you care about" - Time to change hobbies and care about things that don't have RAM then.
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I wish Sam Altman to encounter difficulties every time he had to use bathroom and increased chance of his phone fell to the toilet all the time.
Does this mean no smart fridges?
Coz that would be cool
i'd be willing to suffer another year of ram shortage if that meant all smart devices fucked off
maybe we could even see actual physical buttons on devices again! i miss buttons and toggles
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I would LOVE to believe this will force automakers to return to using buttons instead of touchscreen.
Yeah, I know. But I'd sure love to believe it.
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The supply chain for computing resources is extremely bottlenecked right now. Even with the high demand for open weight AI models the data centers hosting them aren't able to get the computing resources they need and they keep running into rate limits even for paid users. Z.ai's hosting quality has dropped which I suspect may be related. Even over the past few weeks this has gotten much worse with the release of Kimi K2.5 being competitive with closed US-based models and OpenCode becoming popular. Meanwhile we have corporations like OpenAI buying up half the world's RAM fucking both other people and other corporations. So I'm not sure where this is going to end up, but the computer hardware market is going to really suck for a while.
Frustratingly this is not just affecting the current generation of devices, but the previous one too. DDR4 RAM (which I use in my desktop) has gone up 300% since I bought it a few years ago.
Here's hoping that nobody needs to replace current or previous gen hardware if it breaks in the next 2 years...
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Don’t be fooled: if RAM had the chance it would kill everyone and everything you’ve ever loved.
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I'm so glad I bought this book years ago
I was saving it for a retirement hobby project but looks like I will have to open it sooner than I thought.
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Jokes on you...