The hardware shortages and prize hikes are not going to end with the AI bubble
The cloud providers and the AI companies are the same companies, and what they have learned is that they can tie up all the high-end hardware for themselves and make it unaffordable for plebs
The hardware companies in turn will be happy to keep prices high even if raw materials are ever more easily available again and demand is (somewhat) lower
Cloud providers will have identified self-hosting, community-organized services, and digital sovereignty campaigns as a threat, in the same way Microsoft identified free software as a threat in the 1990s and 2000s, and they will want to stamp out that threat. Keeping prices high to make self-hosting uneconomical is one way to do this
Isn’t it curious how Apple has brought out its cheapest laptop ever at a time when hardware is otherwise at its most expensive in a long time? It’s an underpowered client for cloud services
Welcome to the future of computing. The ‘thin client’ dream of the 90s is here!
@dpk oohhhh. The internet is the Mainframe and our laptops are the Workstations
