[tpurves]

Dell is cooked this year for reasons entirely outside their control. DRAM and storage/drive shortages are causing costs of those to go to the moon. And Dell's 'inventory' light supply chain and narrow margins puts them in a perfect storm of trouble.

[leptons]

I can't wait for all the data center fire-sales when the whole "AI" boom goes bust. Ebay is going to be flooded with tech.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I can't wait for all the data center fire-sales when the whole "AI" boom goes bust. Ebay is going to be flooded with tech.

I think a lot of the hardware of these "AI" servers will rather get re-purposes for more "ordinary" cloud applications. So I don't think your scenario will happen.

[trympet]

Yep, hyperscalers go on and on about the "fungible" datacenter capacity in their earning calls as a hedge for a sudden decrease in demand. I could see a scenario where there would be an abundance of GPU capacity, but I’m sure we’d find uses for those too. For instance, there are classic data retrieval workloads that can be accelerated using GPUs.

[dude250711]

Anything but admitting that AI king is naked, here on HN...

[cogman10]

What? No, this is a pretty relevant comment that is being directly caused by AI.

Consumer PCs and hardware are going to be expensive in 2026 and AI is primarily to blame. You can find examples of CEOs talking about buying up hardware for AI without having a datacenter to run it in. This run on hardware will ultimately drive hardware prices up everywhere.

The knock on effect is that hardware manufacturers are likely going to spend less money doing R&D for consumer level hardware. Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars making a 700 core beast for AI workloads in a datacenter? And you can get a nice premium for that product because every AI company is fighting to get any hardware right now.

[bluGill]

> Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same research dollars

You might be right, but I suspect not. While the hardware company are willing to do without laptop sales, data centers need the power efficiency as well.

Facebook has (well had - this was ~10 years ago when I heard it) a team of engineers making their core code faster because in some places a 0.1% speed improvement across all their servers results in saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per month (sources won't give real numbers but reading between the lines this seems about right) on the power bill. Hardware that can do more with less power thus pays for itself very fast in the data center.

Also cooling chips internally is often a limit of speed, so if you can make your chip just a little more efficient it can do more. Many CPUs will disable parts of the CPU not in use just to save that heat, if you can use more of the CPU that translates to more work done and in turn makes you better than the competition.

Of course the work must be done, so data centers will sometimes have to settle for whatever they can get. Still they are always looking for faster chips that use less power because that will show up on the bottom line very fast.

[flyinghamster]

See also, Crucial exiting the marketplace. That one hit me out of left field, since they've been my go-to for RAM for decades. Though I also see that as a little bit of what has been the story of American businesses: "It's too much trouble to make consumer products. Let's just make components or sell raw materials, or be middlemen instead. No one will notice."

[kristianp]

Dell is doing very well on Server sales if I recall correctly. Should offset any PC sales slump.

[soupfordummies]

So it was RAM a couple months ago and now storage/drives are going to the moon also?

[stonogo]

It was RAM a couple months ago, and it continues to be RAM. Major RAM manufacturers like SK Hynix are dismantling NAND production to increase RAM manufacturing, which is leading to sharp price increases for solid-state storage.