Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI (opens in new tab)

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content.

I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and individuals are either pushed towards closed hardware like Playstation, MacBooks, and Android devices or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.

Anecdata to add to the pile...I pulled three 1u epyc gen2 servers from my production rack 1.5 years ago and replaced them with lower power alternatives for a production storage cluster. I didn't need the extra CPUs for app server stuff so they sat in my house for a while. Fast forward 1.5 years and it was making sense to upgrade some app servers to new gen stuff, get a bump in frequency and core count...when i went to spec some new servers, my normal $15k - $20k build was $55k.

Instead, I hittup ebay, got six used gen3 processors, found a "good deal" on a couple tb of new ram (still insanely expensive), and came out with the same overall horsepower for a total of $20k instead of $110k.

I know this is about consumer desktop, but seeing the comments about upgrading old hardware caused me to chime in. This is happening in the production/enterprise level in some segments.

"Despite this drop in sales, these companies aren’t exactly struggling. Asus, Gigabyte, and ASRock have pivoted some of their production towards AI servers, allowing them to capture some of the investments that hyperscalers are generously pouring into their data centers. But if you’re planning to build a completely new PC from scratch, you might be able to find good deals on motherboard combos, especially as retailers are keen on getting their inventories moving. "

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1. Within a few months, these manufacturers will likely raise desktop mobo and CPU prices with the justification that "volumes are too low".

2. If you're upgrading from an older machine, it likely has a format of RAM that's not compatible with newer boards. Upgrading the cheap parts now and waiting for the expensive bits to come down is simply not an option. It's all or nothing.

Game and application developers should be paying close attention to this. You're used to the average user's system spec going up every year. That's stopped for now. The average memory in new systems may actually retreat!

Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.

Not just motherboards. Cases, PC accessories (fans, etc), consumer SSDs, and more. Cases are especially hard hit, apparently, as they're already quite a low margin business.

Personally, I see little reason to upgrade from my AM4 platform. It's never been easier to hold on to aging hardware with the advent of DLSS stretching older cards further, diminishing returns on the newer gen GPUs, and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.

I'm one of the collapsed sales. My desktop had died, and I had been thinking about rebuilding it.

But RAM prices went to the moon, so I instead opted to repair the desktop. (It's only ~15 years old.) It's alive, again, and performs well enough.

The HDD in it is pretty old (not as old as the rest of it, it's on its second drive; 15 years would be quite impressive!), and still works for now, but there too, prices are silly and well above inflation. (I looked it up again: the same HDD is 50% more expensive today than when I bought it, in real, accounting-for-inflation dollars.)

Shortages or not, there's little demand for cool new motherboards and CPUs from the enthusiast corner of the market because hardware platforms themselves are stagnating performance-wise.

13-14gen Intel Cores are still more than enough for your average home gamer, Zen 5 shows only marginal improvement over Zen 4 except for a very narrow range of workloads, getting wider than 128bit memory bus is prohibitively expensive while relatively cheap consumer boxes like Mac Mini run circles around dual-channel DDR5 setups, so on, so forth.

Sure, presenting this as a consequence of AI boom is convenient for a news outlet, but even before the craze both Intel and AMD were dragging their feet.

I'm not buying it. Both the premise and the new motherboard, that is.

Shortage of ram and ssds, and soon, cpus. Motherboards aren’t selling because theres no point buying a motherboard if you can’t by the ram or ssd it needs.

It’s brutal. I’ve just built a workstation with DDR4 and two-gen old cpu. I paid more for the ddr4 than it originally cost, four years ago. The same amount of ram for the latest motherboard would have been 10x ($10,000). So used DDR4 has gone through the roof, which impacts hobbyists who used to rely on “hand-me-downs”.

10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to actually reach on parity with node size. And sadly it looks like I was correct in my prediction.

This is really a two-for-one for the AI companies: they lock up the hardware market for their growth while also making sure no-one can buy hardware to host models locally.

High end resins and epoxies are in a critical supply shortage right now. I suspect that there are going to be some serious resource driven PCB shortages in the very near future.

When photosynthesis first appeared, the oxygen it produced poisoned the existing life. Sulfur-breathers basically disappeared. In the geologic record the oxygen shows up as massive layers of iron oxide which we mine and turn into steel now. New things can radically shake up the existing environment, the degree of shakeup is the measure of how radical it is.

I'm thinking about how I jumped on getting a new PC a little over a year ago anticipating tariffs would balloon prices. Turns out I made the right choice but for the wrong reasons (not like the tariffs are helping either, but just wasn't as big of a factor).

I'm sure the AI shortages are hurting, but also I'm still using my same motherboard from 2020 and I see no reason why I should have to upgrade in the next 2-3 years (whenever I buy my RTX 7070Ti, it might be time, but maybe not even then).

I guess my hasty purchase meant as only a temporary, times were tight, placeholder Dell Inspiron in 2015 has to do me for another ten years.

No point in buying motherboards if you can't afford to put any RAM in it.

AI is simultaneously the reason you can't buy a motherboard and the reason you don't need to build a PC anymore. The industry is eating itself from both ends.

Progress, in any meaningful sense, has to mean we are more capable of sustaining ourselves than we were before. Burning down the commons to train and serve a mythomaniac chatbot is not that. The consumer markets that still worked will shrink, and some will die.

I was looking into self-hosting deekseek v4 pro since frankly cache reads are an absolute scam and they're 90% of the cost, but then I looked at the ROI and it will never pay off fast enough because the hardware will become obsolete faster even if you were running 10 token generation streams 24/7.

The napkin math resulted that renting is around 27 times cheaper than owning (not including power). I think we're really screwed when it comes to having owned access to AI unless intel comes out swinging with a c series card that has 128gb vram so we can run them in a 4x128gb configuration, but seems unlikely since nvidia has a large share in them.

This was calculated expecting around 30tok/s, of course you can get 2-5tok/s much much cheaper, but it's unusable for my workflow.

I know it's going to be extremely painful, but the sooner this ridiculous unsustainable AI bubble pops the better off we'll be. The more it inflates the more collateral damage it will cause, and we're probably already looking at 2008 levels of financial chaos.

Weren't we supposed to be living in the post-scarcity era?

The brief window between the covid gaming bubble pop/PoS ETH switch and the AI hardware blackhole will be fondly remembered as the last golden age of consumer PC hardware accessibility.

When RAM and an SSD cost more than an entire system used to it's not surprising to see this.

We are in AI mania right now. I dont think this will continue forever.

They should try releasing one with a futuristic space-age design and flashing rainbow lights. Maybe give it a name like HARDTEK and put some random techy shapes all over it.

Who will be the first motherboard maker to put out a board with 12 slots for legacy RAM?

This makes me sad. My son was just about to be old enough to build his first PC, and was showing interest. I guess I'm going to have match his savings 1:1 to make it possible now.

I think the shocking part is it's only projected to go down with 25%. That's quite mild given the increase in memory, storage and GPU prices, in my view.

I assume manufacturers were making enough motherboards in 2025 to fulfill demand, so what happens when the demand is the same but the production is 25% less? Crazy.

See Permacomputing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044638

Maybe with AI we can finally kill user-owned computing, and make almost everyone renters.

It's really wrong that the common people have access to things like PCs. It leaves a lot of money on the table the corporations can extract, and makes control much harder. PCs should cost at least as much as a car, so only the right people can afford them.

Own nothing and be happy.

And flying pugs gonna fall from teh sky too.

considering how unsustainable this whole AI Business is and how much it ruins everything, I can't wait for the crash.

Why did we listen to the Worldcoin guy again?

Waiting for the future where the only computing devices you can buy as a consumer are locked-down phones and PCs are simply not available anymore...

It's not just new hardware, even used hard drives manufactured a decade ago have at least doubled in price. Scam Altman has effectively killed personal computing for all but the most affluent

Will demand for computing ever go down from where it is now? Even if the AI bubble temporarily pops, in the long run I think the demand for computers will be practically infinite.

Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.

PCs and higher-end IoT devices (like RPi) are becoming less and less affordable. The web is saturated with slop and bot traffic. I wonder how many people think about what this means. We are rapidly losing several of our major technological ecosystems that have driven economic growth in the past few decades. It's not at all clear what economic benefits we will be getting in return.

It looks like we are going to start to see consumer components stop being created in the first place, as demand dries up to the point where it's no longer worth it to serve the consumer market at all. Almost purely because the supply is already so low that almost no one is willing to pay the price.

I would say that since more and more of the world wants/needs sovereignty in this space, more and more options would come up in the next 5 years. They will probably not be the cutting edge we have now but personal computing will not die. It will just get a (healthy) reset.

As an example?

...just as the kleptocrats wanted, to stop the spread of self-hosting and desktop computing now that society is tentatively starting to go digital.

Is now a good time to get a upgrade for cpu and motherboard?

"Fueled by greed". It would be trivial to say no to AI companies because dollars are dollars, it doesn't matter who pays them, and prioritizing literally all of humanity instead of "five companies" is a choice that every single supplier could make, but decided not to. This problem was 100% manufactured by suppliers.

"fueled by AI"

poor Joe Rogan

Reminds me of how ever since egg prices went to the moon we've all had to give up dessert and subsist on thin gruel for breakfast.

What's that? Egg prices are back down after suppliers cranked up their output? Surely nothing like that is possible with hardware... Personal computing is dead forever...