102
AI demand triggers massive PCB shortage for PC makers as order books full until 2030 — lead times stretch to 30 months as material costs surge 12x (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The AI industry continues to gobble up manufacturing resources that were once dedicated to serving PC, smart device, and gadget makers. We’ve seen huge demand/supply driven price rises in RAM, GPUs, SSDs, and more through 2026. Now that most basic and unglamorous electronics necessity, the PCB, looks set to join them. A news report published by Nikkei Asia quotes several leading PC and PCB industry managers, making it clear we are going to see PCB (and PCB subcomponent) shortages and price rises in the coming months.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 32 points 1 week ago (5 children)

What makes it even better is they bought up all the existing equipment for data centers that aren't even built. And a lot of them won't be. And by the time they are, what's been bought and piled up in warehouses, will be obsolete and need replacement. Before it's ever taken out of the box.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 5 child comments
    •
  • [–] 22 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    It's by design. Altman literally bought the wafers themselves. We need laws to protect against this, and also a serious law with criminal liability for the destruction of it.

    Once it comes the time, it will be better for them to destroy the GPUs and ask for more bailout money than to put them on eBay for cheap. The end game is a monopoly, this is just the first step. They can't let prices go back down afterwards either.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago*

    In a normal non-bubble world it would just be considered anti-competitive practices. Also typically it's not possible to do this, as it's like lighting a pile of money on fire and a single company can't afford to buy everything to starve their competition of infrastructure. A private business would vote that moron out, and a public one does the same with shareholder votes.

    The problem was irrational exhuberance and everybody doing it everywhere. It self corrects eventually with the public likely eating the losses... but the hardware itself is marked down, discounted, and liquidated just the same so it'll restore the market for components that way.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago

    That's the plan, so they can sell you Raspberry Pi 1-tier hardware on an HDMI stick, that you can "just plug into your TV or monitor, and rent a real powerful PC from the cloud, and never worry about obsolescence", as they dreamed about it since 2012.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    Which means I can buy 32GB+ accelerator cards for peanuts on Ebay to run DS4.1 or Qwen3.8 at home on my own machines.

    Same with memory eventually despite the memory cartel trying to prevent it from happening. Once demand implodes for GPUs, so does this synthetic demand for so much HBM, which means a pivot back into consumer memory and normal server RAM...

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    LLMs are still mostly useless, unless you want to fry your brain. The people that claim "moderate usage is the way to go" are just like the "I only drink one beer a day" alcoholists. Sure they don't get so drunk every day they're trashing pubs and the likes, but that doesn't mean they're not addicted.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent