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.

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.

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...

More to the point, how is it even possible to cause such a shortage? PCBs aren't even particularly high-tech the way the chips are; a determined enthusiast could make them at home.

And I don't mean just etching the circuits: I mean you could get some fiberglass, copper foil, and epoxy resin, and laminate your own from scratch.

I feel like they want to make it so physical PC's are dead and you just buy a screen that streams it from some Nvidia server. That way you can't pirate, or download a song. And since they own it all it's a monthly subscription they can increase slowly over time.

Which is why I will make my current devices last forever and my current car

Perhaps not enough companies printing? Unless it's very specifically the raw material cost

Probably gonna need to use the parts to build your perimeter protection and alert bots during the fall of mankind when that happens

Odds are, they'll be repurposed for cloud computation and/or social media bot farms.

So, no. I doubt it. Although I would like cheap hardware, considering my main machine is from 2010.