TLDR:
OpenAI made a deal to secure 40% of the global supply of wafers from both SK Hynix and Samsung (2 of the 3 large providers of RAM) ostensibly for project Stargate server farms. But it gets so much worse, they made both deals on the same day without advising the other company, and have not provisioned any way to actually use (make chips from) the wafers. It looks more like they’re just trying to keep RAM out of the hands of their competitors.
From there the laws of supply and demand and panic buying by everyone else took over, RAM prices are going to the moon, and Micron (the third big provider) dropped out of the consumer market because they’re gonna make bank in the server market as the only unencumbered company. Consumer general purpose computer customers are royally boned. This will flow through into the SSD market as well.
In short, Fsck the AI industry in general and Fsck ‘OpenAI’ and Sam Altman in particular. If you pray, pray that this deal gets a legal injunction in South Korea, coz you know the US will just applaud this fsckery.
so happy I built a new PC last year. so pissed I cant make a new server this year
Since we’ve all enjoyed SaaS allowing us to pay monthly fees until death for everything from our word processor to our sleep tracker, get ready for Compute as a Service to take over everything else once none of us can afford home computing.
yes this is terrifying, actually.
For a personal server, just buy a liquidated office/business workstation and add storage as needed. Probably will still be cheap since the win10 EOL has led a bunch of those machines onto auction sites.
I appreciate the advice, but that’s what I’ve got already. It works well, but I was hoping to make a significant upgrade and move away from spinning disks and such.
Thing is, at the scale that a home server is likely to be providing, you don’t really need an upgrade at all for any of the components except storage and maybe a 2.5gig ethernet card depending on services available.
Also, like the other commenter said: SSDs. SATA ones (unless you have free PCIE lanes then use an m.sata adapter board).
yeah and this may be the way to go at this point. i was just excited to make a totally custom rig and use things like Gen 5 pcie nvme. but now I’ll just not do that. fingers crossed the bubble pops and a bunch of these bullshit “ai” businesses stop existing
SSDs (Slow Spinny Disks)
I am currently building a server, I have five things left to get before I can use it, two 8TB HDDs, two 2TB SSDs and a SATA controller card.
I bought RAM for ut this summer a 2x 16GB Kingston kit, that kit has increased in cost by 1000SEK, insane…
Get the SSDs pronto…