EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.
That's a bit off the mark. Processors, RAM, and flash memory each require their own specialized fabs. TSMC makes processors but not DRAM or NAND flash. Kioxia makes flash only. Samsung has all three types of fabs. Micron does DRAM and NAND, in different fabs.
The increase in SSD prices is not because there are many components competing for the same constrained resources, it's that they are complementary goods being subject to the same dynamics in parallel because the servers that are causing this demand spike need all of those components. Where we do see competition for the same fab capacity is in the mix of DRAM types, where GPUs want HBM, server CPUs want DDR5, laptops and phones (and the occasional server CPU) want LPDDR. And competition among different types of processors for TSMC's fab capacity.
It doesn't change your point that these lines are different and the immediate price spike is not about them competing for capacity in the same facilities, but the fact that manufacturers are committing to large enough future purchases to drive new fab construction means that future pricing outlook (which does impact the current prices to extent) does involve some amount of competition between different types of semiconductor products.
This is a big bet. Look at what happened in 2001 with the dot-com boom. We're still trading on their dark fiber over-build today. Meanwhile any overcapacity built in fabs will quickly be made obsolete by newer and better fab technology (or at least, that's been the pattern for the past 30 years).
I think you're missing the fact that building new supply takes time and sustained commitment, and there's simply nobody in a good position to make that commitment without losing big if your thesis turns out to be wrong.
If the demand for new AI builds is eventually satisfied, or worse, craters overnight, then who will be left holding the bag? It sure won't be Google or Apple, or even NVIDIA - it will be TSMC and Samsung.
But as you mention, this is all temporary. Either you're right, and demand will remain sustained long enough for some of the providers to decide to take that risk, or demand will crater and prices will fall.
The fact that the S&P 500 is near record highs at the same time as consumer confidence is at a 70 year low is not encouraging for continued all steam ahead in my mind... but then it's easy to predict a general future recession, and much harder to predict it to the day.
The major companies have been trying to build >$100B of new production capacity in the US for years now. All of these manufacturing facilities have been significantly delayed by NIMBYs using the same "environmental and community concerns" advocacy slop that hinders almost all productive industry in the US.
Blaming the suppliers is a lazy take. They aren't responsible for degrowth activists being able to dictate what we are allowed to build.
Like, there's so many things that could benefit from a cheap processor involved in their operation, the growth seems effectively unlimited.
The pandemic caused once such boom-bust that resulted in a rather large downturn in demand in 2022-2023 referred to as the pandemic hangover. During that time demand dropped following overspend during the pandemic and members of the cartel drastically cut production at times to keep prices above cost. Even after the demand recovery began in 2023, the cartel members were slow to increase production and made little to no investment in production capacity in 2024-2025. Creating a shortage.
The AI hype cycle has exacerbated the shortage by creating speculative purchases and then panic buying. Remember the shoe company that pivoted to AI?
So Cartel market manipulation is partially to blame for the over 100% increase in prices and the shortages.
The Market™ is perhaps going after higher margins. If you can charge $200 instead of $100 for a widget, why wouldn't you?
Ideally at some point someone will see the margins and be motivated to go after some of it and offer things for $190, but the ROI on upfront fab costs given market risks may not be high enough for the business uncertainly that needs to be taken (boom-bust cycles).
No participant in The Market is obligated to "cater" to demand if they do not think the juice is worth the squeeze.
The reality is all the things we learned from the Great Depression have been forgotten, and half the voting public seems to champion monopolies while simultaneously acting dumbfounded that the end result will always be an increase in costs.
NIMBYs and degrowth activists own this particular "market failure". The companies have been trying to invest in capacity ahead of demand but have been prevented from doing so.
I think a lot of people will accept industry when industry tries to be a good steward of the community's environment.
Last half year ate up three to four years of earlier price regression, that's about it.
As long as this plateaus here, as prices did for last 4 months, that's just the new equilibrium where it has the chance to get better again, would no be all doom and gloom about personal computing yet.
The doomerism surrounding this topic is wild.
Gas prices have also gone up recently, but I don't see the same claims about how it's the end of personal vehicles, that the prices are never coming down, or that we're all becoming renters instead of buyers.
Saying that there isn't a force countering this is peak doomerism. New factories take a long time to build. These companies didn't have spare production lines waiting for demand to go up.
It's intuitively obvious to a lot of people that the era of personal, wholly owned transportation is waning. A lot of people seem to miss the second clause of that old "you'll own nothing" phase, the part where most people are happy about it!
When vehicles drive themselves, and there's a large enough pool that one can show up pretty reliably within a few minutes of your needing one, how many people are going to choose to own when renting is cheaper and easier?
And some do. Most don’t, for the same reasons self driving doesn’t matter.
Or it could be that I mostly talk to people in the real world, and less so follow the echo chambers online that think "you'll own nothing" is a foregone conclusion about the future and fit their worldview to match.
I remember selling some ancient GPUs that I was going to throw away during one of the previous booms.
I also thought about upgrading my gen4 SSD at the same time. It was still meeting all my needs, so I thought if I waited, I could get a bigger, faster one for cheap later. Mistake!
Things will normalize, semis are a boom and bust industry, and it takes a massive amount of capital investment to increase supply. Because of that boom and bust, the producers are wary of growing their supply to keep up in lockstep with demand, because they might end up with a glut that they have a hard time selling, and a large pile of debt from building out that glut. Semiconductors at the leading edge take very large, very expensive, very rube goldbergian machines to make them, and a very skilled workforce to make those work.
If this stuff stays this expensive/profitable, industry will grow capacity to boost earnings until they overshoot, there's not some grand conspiracy to make you rent everything. We're just in a massive dislocation right now because we've discovered this awesome new tool that's boosting demand by a ridiculous degree. Last year we were at ~$300B of capital investment in DCs in the US, this year it's looking like ~$750B.
Production cartels exist to prevent individual greed from "ruining" it for the rest of the group. OPEC does it in the overtly, memory manufactures do it covertly, and have been convicted of conspiring in multiple jurisdictions, on multiple occasions.
Basically I like to use them as a cheap “better” thumb drive, putting ventoy on them with no concern for space, along with a fat32 partition for bios updates.
These along with a nanoKVM box my siblings can attach to the computers I built for them makes remote troubleshooting relatively painless when rustdesk isn’t sufficient.
Same a consumers (car drivers) subsidizing businesses (trucks). Road damage is almost entirely caused by trucks, 4th power of weight, but the cost is borne by us.
This is the first time I've had a computer have a complete failure and no way to fix it as I look around at the used market and the latest generation market. I'm kind of just disillusioned.
what happens is that the industry goes through certain discrete technical upgrades. for instance, EUV in fabs, or GMR disk heads. none of these are really planned, none of them are exponential. and they usually interact with other phenomena (such as Dennard scaling).
in a sense, the phenomenon is more like "expectations are exponential, and this motivates manufacturers to schedule updates".
hard disks are still improving, arguably similar to how they have in the past, but there are limits to demand. the consumer market has mostly dropped out, for instance due to flash.
even in flash, there is no exponential scaling in devices. people got excited in the initial startup, when for instance, mature TLC is so much better than early SLC. but all that's over: it's both mature and we'll probably never see PLC. even QLC is interesting in that it illustrates that most of our storage is very cold.
ebbs and flows
