walterbell
4 hours ago
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chip-crunch-how-ai-boom-...
> spot prices of DRAM, used in various applications, nearly tripled in September from a year earlier.. improving profitability of non-HBM chips has helped fuel memory chipmakers' share price rally this year, with Samsung's stock up more than 80%, while SK Hynix and Micron shares have soared 170% and 140% respectively... industry is going through a classic shortage that usually lasts a year or two, and TechInsights is forecasting a chip industry downturn in 2027.
Micron has US memory semiconductor fab capacity coming online in 2027 through 2040s, based on $150B new construction.
Are some HBM chips idle due to lack of electrical power? https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-has-ai-...
> Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said the company has AI GPUs sitting idle because it doesn’t have enough power to install them.
If the PC supply chain will be impacted by memory shortages until 2027, could Windows 10 security support be extended for 24 months to extend the life of millions of business PCs that cannot run Windows 11?
bigbadfeline
3 hours ago
> Micron has US memory semiconductor fab capacity coming online in 2027 through 2040s, based on $150B new construction.
Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.
I guess, you offered the news hoping prices will fall... In terms of real economic analysis there's a lot to say here but let me point at only one of the many entry points of the rabbit hole:
"Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Microsoft and all other AI wannabes are hoarding GPUs and thus RAM, they hope to sell them to you for a price of subscription which doesn't change the fact of speculative hoarding and trust-like behavior against the public.
The hoarding and inflation economy we live in is a weapon against the public, at the moment, there's no visible force that isn't laboring diligently on the enhancement of that weapon, so the timeline of change is likely to stretch somewhere between far in the future to infinity... just hoping otherwise is futile.
If you pay attention, you won't fail to notice the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines. In other words, you pay the price, they own the benefits. And if the propaganda fails, they can always use some more general inflation to do the same, as it's being done elsewhere in the economy.
As I said, this is just scratching the surface, there's a lot more which cannot fit in a single comment.
Edit: actually not. The parent comment was edited after mine, to include a link to MS inadvertently admitting to the hoarding of GPUs and RAM.
gruez
3 hours ago
>Yay, the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.
Where does it say it was funded by $150B of public loans?
>which doesn't change the fact of speculative hoarding
All investment resembles "speculative hoarding'. You're pouring money into a project now with the expectation that it'll pay off in decades.
> and trust-like behavior against the public.
???
>If you pay attention, you won't fail to notice the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines. In other words, you pay the price, they own the benefits. And if the propaganda fails, they can always use some more general inflation to do the same, as it's being done elsewhere in the economy.
Datacenters are actually associated with lower electricity costs in the US
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/10/30/the-data-...
bigbadfeline
2 hours ago
> Where does it say it was funded by $150B of public loans?
let me repeat something you've already quoted
>> the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.
one more time "to be payed by inflationary pricing"
> Datacenters are actually associated with lower electricity costs in the US.
"Associated" means these areas are getting preferential pricing to shift more of the cost to the public. Proves my point.
The actual truth, with numbers, just for 2024 and Virginia alone:
"Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, last month released an analysis estimating that data centers had added billions of dollars to Americans’ electric bills across seven different states in recent years. In Virginia alone, for instance, Jacobs found that household electric bills had subsidized data center transmission costs to the tune of $1.9 billion in 2024."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ai-data-center-backlash
Also:
"Over the last five years, commercial users including data centers and industrial users began drinking more deeply from the grid, with annual growth rising 2.6% and 2.1%, respectively. Meanwhile, residential use only grew by 0.7% annually."
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/01/rising-energy-prices-put-a...
gruez
2 hours ago
>let me repeat something you've already quoted
>>> the public is on the hook for $150B of loans to be payed by inflationary pricing.
That framing makes even less sense. Even if we grant that capital spending is inflationary, nobody thinks the public is "on the hook" or pays for it "by inflationary pricing". If I bought a box of eggs, it probably drives up the price of eggs by some minute amount in the aggregate, but nobody would characterize that as the public being "on the hook" for it, or that the public is paying for it "by inflationary pricing". Same if I bought anything else supply constrained, like an apartment or GPU. Seemingly the only difference between those and whatever Micron is doing is that you don't like Micron and/or the AI bubble, whereas you at least tolerate me buying eggs, apartments, or GPUs, so your whole spiel about "payed by inflationary pricing" is just a roundabout way of saying you don't like Micron/AI companies' spending. I also disagree with people dropping $30K on hermes handbags, but I wouldn't characterize buying them as "the public is on the hook for $30k to be payed by inflationary pricing".
>The actual truth, with numbers, just for 2024 and Virginia alone:
"actual truth"? That settles it, then.
On a more substantive note, since you clearly haven't bothered to look into either article to examine their methodology, here's the relevant snippets for your convenience:
>Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at UCS, uncovered these additional costs by analyzing last year’s filings from utilities in seven PJM states and identifying 130 projects that will connect private data centers directly to the high-voltage transmission system. Over 95% of the projects identified passed all of their transmission connection costs onto local people’s electricity bills, totaling $4.3 billion in costs previously undistinguished from other, more typical expenses to upgrade and maintain the electricity grid.
and
>The Economist has adapted a model of state-level retail electricity prices from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to include data centres (see chart 2). We find no association between the increase in bills from 2019 to 2024 and data-centre additions. The state with the most new data centres, Virginia, saw bills rise by less than the model projected. The same went for Georgia. In fact, the model found that higher growth in electricity demand came alongside lower bills, reflecting the fact that a larger load lets a grid spread its fixed costs across more bill-payers.
>chart 2: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251101_USC...
Looking at the two different methodologies, the economist methodology seem far more reasonable, because the UCS's methodology is basically guaranteed to come up with a positive number. It just counts how much money was spent on connecting datacenters, and assumes assumes household users are paying the entire bill. It doesn't account for different rates/fees paid by retail/household users, or the possibility that datacenters could be paying more than their "fair share" of costs through other means (eg. they might require disportionately less infrastructure to service, but pay the same transmission rates as everyone else).
bigbadfeline
an hour ago
> If I bought a box of eggs, it probably drives up the price of eggs by some minute amount in the aggregate
"Eggs"? "Eggs" are the same as "apartment or GPU"? You display all of the comprehension abilities of an LLM... or the mainstream economist "teaching" it.
Semiconductor capex are huge compared to, eh, "eggs", and they must be payed off as part of pricing. Artificial jump in demand, as from hoarding, makes the capex artificially high and the pricing inflationary.
Also, hoarding semiconductors (private NPUs like TPUs, Trainiums, etc, stocking on hard to obtain GPUs) reduces competition and via renting, the respective services can extract the inflated capex plus high profits.
gruez
40 minutes ago
>"Eggs"? "Eggs" are the same as "apartment or GPU"? You display all of the comprehension abilities of an LLM... or the mainstream economist "teaching" it.
How did you miss the part about "anything else supply constrained", which was between "eggs" and "apartments"? Or are too lazy to search up "egg shortage"? Maybe you should check your own reading comprehension before accusing others of poor reading comprehension.
>Semiconductor capex are huge compared to, eh, "eggs", and they must be payed off as part of pricing.
Yet the aggregate demand of all americans drive the price of eggs, apartments, or GPUs. Either something drives inflation, or it doesn't. Otherwise you're just critiquing Micron's size rather than what their behavior is.
>Artificial jump in demand, as from hoarding, makes the capex artificially high and the pricing inflationary.
>Also, hoarding semiconductors (private NPUs like TPUs, Trainiums, etc, stocking on hard to obtain GPUs) reduces competition and via renting, the respective services can extract the inflated capex plus high profits.
1. There's no alternate universe where absent "hoarding", everyone would be running LLMs on their own GPUs at home. The frontier models require multiple 128+GB GPUs to run, and most people only do a few minutes of inference a day. There's no way the economics of buying works out.
2. "AI GPUs sitting idle because it doesn’t have enough power to install them" doesn't imply "hoarding", any more than buying PC parts but not building them because the last part hasn't arrived yet isn't "hoarding". It could simply be that they expected that power be available, but due to supply chain issues they aren't. Moreover hoarding GPUs would be a terrible idea, because they're a rapidly depreciating asset. No cloud provider is trying to corner the market on CPUs by buying them up and renting it back to people, for instance, and CPU is a much easier market to corner because the rate of advancement (and thus rate of depreciation) is much lower.
hexbin010
3 hours ago
> the propaganda push to convince the public to pay higher electric costs in order to pay the capex for new energy plants and transmission lines.
This makes me so angry.
The private companies told governments they want money and the governments replied "sure we'll just steal it from citizens and lie and sell it as a tax, no problem. We'll just go hard on the net zero excuse lol" ??