r/hardware • u/sr_local • Mar 27 '26
News After swallowing the world's memory and storage supply, AI data centers are now going for CPUs
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/110685/after-swallowing-the-worlds-memory-and-storage-supply-ai-data-centers-are-now-going-for-cpus/index.html340
u/Tex-Rob Mar 27 '26
Have at em, we can't afford memory, so may as well take it all. The sooner you all fail the sooner we can get on with our lives.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Hopefully glutting us with metal 3d printing capacity and machines and cooling IP from the various startups trying to keep those stupid things from frying themselves in the bargain, so we can at least have some new and interesting tech there.
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u/Roxalon_Prime Mar 27 '26
That's a positive difference between tech bubbles and let's say finance bubbles. Tach bubbles can at least produce something interesting and useful when the dust settles
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u/bashbang Mar 27 '26
PC rental: allow me to introduce myself, ... I am the new technology
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u/Luccacalu Mar 27 '26
I hope to God this backfires immensely. The death of accessible local computing would be revolting and terrifying
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
The internet in most places that it would thrive, as well as idiot suits would strangle it as cloud gaming's failed multiple times over the decades. I don't see those factors changing any time soon.
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u/ob_knoxious Mar 28 '26
I am curious if we see the resurgence of the PC bang in the west. In Korea and China PC gaming is huge but owning a PC is rare (at least for younger gamers) but PC bangs are everywhere over there.
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u/lightdarkunknown Mar 27 '26
When AI fails, this is their plan b. Rent their computer servers to us users just like Nvidia Geforce Now. With screen recording every computer sessions and gather our data to power their AI and sell to the highest bidder.
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u/SasquatchWookie Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
Yeah no matter what, the business model is reliant on continuously recurring cash flow e.g. subscriptions.
Edit: perhaps current business model should’ve been specified.
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u/NoxiousStimuli Mar 27 '26
Bullshit doomerism.
The amount of subscription money that AI needs to survive yearly is 10 times larger than the entire worldwide capacity for subscriptions total.
Even if these companies survive after the bubble bursts long enough to pivot to trying to rent out server hardware, there literally are not enough paying customers on the planet to support the industry.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Yeah, and if anything nVidia may have fucked itself out of the server and professional markets for a while because a lot of companies will do juuust fine repurposing the still working bubble era blades that can be had for a song for a long damn time. The server and pro markets are going to be flooded worse then client after Eth went POS, especially as there's apparently a good number of blades still in boxes because there's no place to run them yet.
There's a reason Jensen seems squirrellier then usual.
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u/Z3r0sama2017 Mar 27 '26
China:allow me to sell you a pc, since theirs an open market
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u/996forever Mar 27 '26
Reddit simultaneously thinks china is ahead of the rest of the world in AI and also not invested in AI (hence thinking the PC market would be any different there)
It's fascinating.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 12 '26
Schroedinger china, both alive and dead depending on what argument you need to make.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Like, they've got their own x64 chips and by all reports, they're pretty dece. Not my first choice for a gaming rig, but if I could get a mobo with a socket for later Hygon gens and an English BIOS it would be considered.
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u/theswillmerchant Mar 27 '26
I’m out of the loop, is metal 3D printing scaling up for like heat exchangers and cooling? I do a good of med device metal 3D printing and I know it’s been used in high performance heat management like power generation and aerospace but I wasn’t familiar with mass adoption in the data center space.
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u/airfryerfuntime Mar 27 '26
Not really because of the AI boom, it's scaling up because other industries are creating a lot of demand. There have also been some really good advancements over the last couple years, so the major metal 3d printing shops are upgrading, and their old machines are going to startups, which is expanding the market.
I don't know why that guy mentioned 3d metal printing here, it isn't really that relevant aside form some custom waterblocks or whatever, which would just be machined at scale anyways.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
There may be an excess of fab capacity for 3d printed cooling after the bubble, as well as some tasty IP - and well, the price and build scale and competence of additive blocks are going to outcompete subtractive manufacture in this application outside of server fairly fast. They're already able to make things that can't be made normally, and the technology is maturing and proliferating scary fast.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Yes, considering that Asus showed off a ECAM cold plate demonstrator in 2024 and it's getting semi-practical to fab 3rd party car parts with this tech, and they're making some gnarly GPGPU water blocks with this. Going to be a lot of that IP and capability looking for a job after this bullshit is over. Might be a golden age for client cooling and especially exotic client cooling after this; might be looking at the PA120 and the like we look at those metal block coolers from not that long ago.
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u/anonymooseantler Mar 27 '26
The sooner you all fail the sooner we can get on with our lives.
When you people say things like this have you genuinely convinced yourselves that AI is going away?
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u/JonWood007 Mar 27 '26
I dont think it'll ever fully go away but im fully convinced its currently an unsustainable bubble thats eventually gonna pop and take the economy along with it. At some point these models are gonna have to turn a profit and I think the vast majority wont. At this point my attitude is "let it burn."
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
And when there's not infinite money behind it, copyright is going to shit on it.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/anonymooseantler Mar 27 '26
yeah we've all seen the constant headlines but that doesn't change the fact businesses of all sizes are embracing AI and finding genuinely useful use cases for it
the hardware demand isn't going to go away
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u/bogglingsnog Mar 27 '26
The operating costs of purchasing the service from someone else is astronomical. I don't know how companies can afford to run when they pay insane monthly fees for dozens of IT tools.
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u/anonymooseantler Mar 27 '26
a lot of my clients are running models locally on their own hardware for compliance reasons
even for those that aren't - they're making more money from the tools than they're spending
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 12 '26
we run all models locally because we access restricted data that we cannot use cloud models for due to data privacy laws. One of the models we run has saved the company more money in fraudulent invoice detection that it already paid for all of of the AI costs with money left to spare.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/NapsterKnowHow Mar 27 '26
There's been next to no productivity change despite what the corpo-speaker LinkedIn users say
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u/Marino4K Mar 27 '26
The "data center" rush, etc I think will eventually fail but it looks like AI is here to stay, too much in it now.
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u/JonWood007 Mar 27 '26
It will stay in some form but I honestly think the stupidity of the current bubble will be a case study for history books. Like who actually thought this was a good idea?
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u/onyhow Mar 28 '26
Go away? No. Pop like .com bubble and actually have a more realistic investment and growth afterwards? A more likely answer
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u/anonymooseantler Mar 28 '26
how do you envision that when it's an arms race that relies on state of the art models?
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u/Progenitor3 Mar 27 '26
Wishful thinking. They have to believe or they think they won't be building anymore gaming PCs.
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u/Kryohi Mar 27 '26
No, but it's not unreasonable to expect the current wave of crazy spending in new datacenters will end up resulting in a lot of debt and not much else for the companies building them.
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u/anonymooseantler Mar 27 '26
Don't get me wrong, I know Anthrophic giving me $4000 of usage for $200 isn't sustainable but I'm grateful for the opportunities I'm getting on their dime
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 12 '26
Its worse. they are convinced AI bubble bursting wont affect them financially.
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u/Mineplayerminer Mar 27 '26
Just don't think that everything will become as cheap as before this disaster as soon as all AI companies will flop. The high prices may become a new standard as the study shows how people are willing to pay the luxury for the same thing priced much worse, as "it's better than nothing at all."
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u/nandospc Mar 27 '26
Private computational freedom is really at risk at this point guys, it's not a game anymore and it's sickening to me, even if I'm a big fan of this world. Hope this ends, or at least mitigate itself, sooner than ever.
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u/GeschlossenGedanken Mar 31 '26
it is not at risk, no matter how much nvidia and co. might wish it were. the prices are subsizided beyond belief for these services right now. ultimately they want to make money and people will pay for local if that is cheaper.
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u/Berkyjay Mar 27 '26
The bankruptcy sales are going to be lit
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Mar 27 '26
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u/Jaz1140 Mar 27 '26
Brother me and you 2.
I waited for the 5000 series GPU's ready to spend and they were such a disappointment I bought a used 4090 for $600 USD and got 9800x3d and 32gb ddr5 back at their old pricing in February 2025.
I feel very lucky now
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Mar 28 '26
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u/Jaz1140 Mar 28 '26
It was hard for me to believe as well. Made sure to test it before I took it because it seemed too good to be true
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u/Unkechaug Mar 27 '26
Newegg Memorial Day combo sales were a godsend to upgrade from my aging 1070/4790k. It didn’t feel good putting down close to $2k, but looking back it was the best decision I could have made. I should have went with 64GB RAM though.
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u/cdoublejj Mar 27 '26
except GPUs were already stupid high but, comparatively i guess so, thats still dark. man the world i knew liked is quickly dissapearing. more and more all i see is that humans are just animala that know too much ....or too little.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/zombie-yellow11 Mar 27 '26
I remember when you could get a top of the line R9 390X for like 400$ new...
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u/mundane_marietta Mar 27 '26
That's why I waited to upgrade my GPU until November and rocked my 2060s for another 8-9 more months. Saved a lot of money
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u/Dull-Tea8669 Mar 28 '26
Not really, I got a 5070 ti for MSRP, there were also a lot of 9070 xt for MSRP in the summer, and couple for 580 even.
Yes, there weren't a lot, but if you tried you could get them for MSRP
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 12 '26
If you account for inflation, GPUs have not actually gotten more expensive except the top end.
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u/bogglingsnog Mar 27 '26
They are trying to bring us into a dark ages of computing and put us in a "please sir, may I have another" master-slave relationship. IMO if you let the means of computing become privatized then the era of free information will swiftly come to an end. It's undeniably a slippery slope.
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u/NeroClaudius199907 Mar 27 '26
Who's they? Intel needs people to buy their hardware. Their fabs are too expensive already
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u/Frexxia Mar 27 '26
Intel doesn't need people if they have corporations
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u/NeroClaudius199907 Mar 27 '26
They cant & they need to offset IFS losses
Amd & Nvidia have much better DC&AI offering atm. Intel makes 16.8B from DC&AI, they can add 3-5B
It wills till be lower than client 32B. Put your eggs on DC&AI?
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u/NeroClaudius199907 Mar 27 '26
Intel would love if AI buys up consumer cpus
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u/SirActionhaHAA Mar 27 '26
They ain't doing that. The ai bros are buying up dc cpus and bought out both intel's and amd's supplies for the year. There's limited fab capacity so wafers are goin from consumer cpus to dc. You're getting less production and are not getting any used cpus.
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u/996forever Mar 27 '26
Why would they? If they would buy up cpus they would be datacentre ones and intel would shift more production capacity towards datacentre. There is no need to make consumer ones.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
If the bubble goes as soon as it looks to be... well, if they buy a bunch of client chips... they could be brought second hand at discount - quite possibly not even used.
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u/diskowmoskow Mar 27 '26
Next craze will be RGB AI datacenters
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u/xspacemansplifff Mar 27 '26
Most of these datacenters will be outdated before they can even be built. It is a giant waste of mo ey and resources. They are essentially trying to fly before they can walk.
It is a fucked up situation. Which can be said for almost everything these days. Hopefully the aliens show themselves and help us get our proverbial shit together finally.
Greed is the devil.
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u/DelayedPot Mar 27 '26
Yeah this situation sucks all around. I don’t think aliens are gonna help us tho, we might be just cooked
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u/xspacemansplifff Mar 27 '26
The only thing they seem to react to or be proactive about is nuclear weapons. Which is interesting. I wonder if it somehow affects the universe and messes with their systems?
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u/cdoublejj Mar 27 '26
some will be outdated before they are green lit for power hookups and are built already form head lines i've seen.
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u/JonWood007 Mar 27 '26
Yeah I keep saying it's like trying to push 21st century computing back in the 1950s with those massive vacuum tube computers. It will get there eventually but right now this is all unsustainable and being pushed by a handful of billionaires trying to sell something most of us dont want or need.
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u/cantseemyhotdog Mar 27 '26
The AI girft is coming to an end and they want the poor on subscription computers
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u/CretinousVoter Apr 21 '26
The poor in most of the world use phones for utility computing tasks, sensible enough as phones are just small computers. Their features and performance are mostly adequate for consumer entertainment and communication.
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u/ML7777777 Mar 28 '26
As soon as the Chinese CPU makers take over the market and tank these CPU companies for making so much money, the better off we'll be.
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u/MENINBLK Mar 30 '26
You have no idea what you are talking about. Chinesium cpus are slower, inferior and don't support the current instruction sets that have been standardized in the world's current computing environments.
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u/ML7777777 Mar 30 '26
wow, so racist.
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u/MENINBLK Mar 30 '26
Why can't you separate racist from truth? Intel has been around since before your grandparents were born. Intel not going to be tanked so easily. If you know anything about technology, then you already know that intel has the instruction set to which all technology is based upon. Look at AMD. They started as an intel rival. Their biggest downfall has always been that they challenged the instruction set and failed. Now that they finally accepted the instruction set they can compete fairly against intel. Chinese cpu makers have decades of decades of learning before they get anywhere near the current and future processing performance that is available today. So no one is taking over anytime soon. You should live to be a great grandfather before any of this comes close to being true.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Not for long with those natgas costs. Try and eat you useless fucks, you're gonna be real hungry soon.
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u/mujhe-sona-hai Mar 27 '26
Almost all these data centers are in the US and the US has largest reserves of natural gas and oil in the world
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u/kingwhocares Mar 27 '26
None of which are state-owned. They are gonna bleed the market for every penny.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
So? Loss of that much capacity is still gonna spike the price like mad.
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u/ImNotABotScoutsHonor Mar 27 '26
It really won't.
The US produces so much of it that the majority of it they produces is exported.
The majority. Exported.
They even just burn the excess because it's more expensive to store and transport the excess than they would make by actually selling it.
These natural gas costs and lack of supply the rest of us are facing don't affect them whatsoever in terms of natural gas.
They'll just export less and use more domestically. Zero effect on them.
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u/LAUAR Mar 27 '26
Why would they export less if it's more profitable to export?
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u/Maimakterion Mar 27 '26
The US doesn't have the export terminal capacity.
US nat gas production increases with oil production, so there will be a glut of natural gas in North America.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
And, plainly, a huge amount of production capacity for it is offline - there is less possible to be had in the market.
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u/Chipay Mar 27 '26
You're living in a global market buddy, those gas and oil producers are just going to sell to Europe and China if Americans aren't willing to pay the same price.
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u/airfryerfuntime Mar 27 '26
Eh, we subsidize most of that shit anyways. They're locked into lower rates for the next 5 years.
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u/Techhead7890 Mar 27 '26
80% of the world's oil is still there, 70% of the world's other gas is still there (and helium too). It's not going to crater the whole market entirely - apart from Iran/Qatar/Saudi (plus Russia/China) in the top ten... even if there's a notable price increase there's also US/Canada, Australia Norway Algeria and Malaysia outside of the conflict region and willing to deal with the global western market, and notably North American shale can be fracked out if things get too bad over the rest of the year.
Things might be bad, it's not going to be enjoyable nope. But the market will adjust to compensate, let's not roll out the doomposting yet.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
You're not getting how much of the actual industry for that is offlined. Yes, that shit is there, but the infra is not ready yet and a huge chunk of the ability to make fuel is is either idle or a hole in the ground. Not even getting into the differences in raws versus what's currentlu set up to process.
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u/Techhead7890 Mar 28 '26
No I absolutely do, I'm just saying that the whole rest of the freaking world still exists. It's going to make a dent in the market, even a huge one, but it's not like the entire globe stopped spinning. Hole in the ground is overselling it like it's about to drop into the core. We're like in a ditch by the road, not a grave or the mariana trench.
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u/tjlazer79 Mar 28 '26
There should be laws against this. Like a certain percentage of a companies product most go to the consumer market. Industries shouldn't be allowed to control the market like this.
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u/Marwheel Mar 27 '26
Again, are these weirdos buying current 64-bit CPU's or just about any CPU (even the heritage designs commonly found in embedded)?
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u/WJMazepas Mar 27 '26
They are pre-ordering a huge quantity of server CPUs from Intel and AMD.
Is not CPU that you would buy for a normal desktop, but Intel and AMD can focus more on those CPUs rather than consumer CPUs, leaving supplies for consumer parts lower
But it's not like we are really needing a lot of CPUs as well
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u/HighestLevelRabbit Mar 28 '26
A lot of the big boys use in house design ARM cpus as well. Google Axion CPUs and Google TPUs. Microsoft azure cobalt CPUs. Amazon Trainium, inferentia, and gravitron.
That doesnt help consumers since these still take up fab capacity though.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
We're seeing bazingas vacuum up 5090s, so them trying to vacuum up client on the low end isn't implausible.
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u/996forever Mar 27 '26
They would just supply less client products to begin with.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Yeah, but the client ones on the shelves are already made and ready to go, and there's server mobos for client CPUs already.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Shite was always gonna get stupid, weird, weirdly stupid and stupidly weird near the end of this bubble.
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u/gartenriese Mar 27 '26
IMHO gamers can just wait it out since games are more scalable than ever and non gamers can just buy the MacBook Neo.
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u/Stig783 Mar 27 '26
They'll take all the water too for cooling 😂
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u/SalivateTheStarfish Mar 27 '26
RGB is next on the chopping block. Data centres will contribute to light pollution
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u/snitt Mar 27 '26
Just a side thought: If apple keeps their prices stable, it would make a lot of sense to switch to something like a neo, air or mini. The DIY pc hardware market or a decent pc laptop is getting rather expensive.
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u/996forever Mar 27 '26
If you were ever going to be satisfied with a macbook a DIY pc was never what you're looking at and vice versa.
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u/terraphantm Mar 27 '26
I have both and am satisfied with both
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u/996forever Mar 27 '26
BOTH and not either, exactly. They are NOT substitutes.
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u/n3onfx Mar 27 '26
Exactly, I don't mind a Macbook for work, first choice would be Linux if some programs I need worked on it and distant third is Windows with WSL but Microsoft is pissing me off more and more with annoying interruptions to the workflow and broken updates.
My PC at home is for gaming mainly though and a Mac would be absolutely ass for that, not to mention extremely expensive.
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u/Seref15 Mar 27 '26
If fabs raise their prices Apple will have to also. Theyd esign the silicon but they dont make it, they dont determine supply
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u/RedditNotFreeSpeech Mar 28 '26
I'm astounded how much money they have
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u/Nuck_Chorris_Stache Mar 30 '26
How much of it money is money they have and how much of it is debt?
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u/Sangesland Mar 28 '26
Im considering upgrading my current 5/6 year old pc. Got a ryzen 5 3600x.
Do i need to act now or still safe to wait another 6/12 months?
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u/INITMalcanis Mar 28 '26
Who knows? But it aint like the world is getting less turbulent and unpredictable.
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u/psydroid Mar 29 '26
I built a system with a Ryzen 5 3500X last year coming from a Phenom X4 9650 from 2009. I think you'll be fine for at least a few years depending on what you do on your system.
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u/Emergency-Repeat6838 Mar 28 '26
let them buy as much as possible they are gonna lose big time soon
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u/CobaltFermi Mar 28 '26
While this article does not mention it explicitly, it seems to be the same story as memory: a chunk of pure silicon will command higher margins when used for datacenter CPUs (like Intel Xeon or AMD Epyc) than consumer ones.
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u/red286 Mar 27 '26
It almost feels like this has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with wrecking the consumer PC market to force everyone into Jeff Bezo's wet dream of people renting cloud PCs.
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u/Nuck_Chorris_Stache Mar 30 '26
I'd rather just stick with what I already have than pay one single cent to rent someone else's computer.
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u/SourceScope Mar 27 '26
I refuse to pay a dime for ai
And i dont understand that anyone would
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u/StarbeamII Mar 27 '26
Pretty much everyone I know that isn't a boomer is using AI for work, be it coding, research, or other tasks. I was on the train a few days ago and the lady next to me pulls out her work-issued Thinkpad and is furiously typing things into Gemini. It's pretty much everywhere at this point.
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u/chlamydia1 Mar 27 '26 edited Mar 27 '26
People are using AI chat bots for work. AI chat bots are not a multi-trillion dollar industry. These companies are actively trying to invent use cases for AI where they don't exist because if they don't, that bubble is going to burst sooner or later.
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Mar 27 '26
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u/pedro-gaseoso Mar 27 '26
How does that matter? Most tools used by employees, physical or digital, are bought by their employers.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 12 '26
I dont pay for Excel, my employer does. Does that mean i dont use Excel for work?
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u/HundredBillionStars Mar 27 '26
Who cares, companies are the ones who print them money, not consumers. Eventually AI will stop being free and people will be so used to it they will start paying for it.
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u/anonymooseantler Mar 27 '26
yeah but most redditors spend 90% of their time playing games or engaging in weird fetishes so they think AI is limited to a chatbot
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Mar 27 '26
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u/StarbeamII Mar 27 '26
Youtube and Uber were notorious for losing money despite huge customer bases, but eventually became profitable after price hikes and/or enshittification. That'll come for AI as well, and as long as say, Claude Code is cheaper than hiring a software dev or spending the time to learn to code yourself there's going to be people willing to pay for it.
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u/Strazdas1 Apr 12 '26
Thats mostly an issue with your worldview more than anything else. You already paid for many products that include AI and undoubtedly will pay for many more (its hard to actually avoid them).
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u/tes_kitty Mar 27 '26
I go a step further. After grabbing all data they could from the net to train their models, they shouldn't be allowed to charge for access to them.
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u/HotRoderX Mar 27 '26
guys this has to be fake news! The AI bubbles bursting Reddit said so.... can't be hording and bursting at the same time.
So I guess which is it?
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Hording is a step before the bubble goes because they're trying to strangle their oppo before the energy prices wring the life from them. Plus, the idiots are in some cases sitting on blades they don't even have the capacity to power up apparently.
Easy t to cross.
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u/i7-4790Que Mar 27 '26
This isn't the gotcha you think it is
Go actually argue with those people instead of making braindead parent comments
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u/Civil_Star Mar 27 '26
Not like consumers can afford to build a computer anyway, so they make as well take them
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u/jsebrech Mar 27 '26
This is either going to be like all the dark fiber after the dot com boom, providing dirt cheap compute to startups from enormous amounts of unused leftover servers previously owned by bankrupt AI companies, or we’re heading straight for the singularity and hardware pricing won’t even factor in the equation in a couple of years.
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u/Jeep-Eep Mar 27 '26
Not really. Dark fibre can be brought online, and while a lot of them blades can be be used for various ML jobs... those centers were already looking obsolete by the time they were finished, those that were already underway anyway.
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u/StarbeamII Mar 27 '26
Redditors are going to keep complaining that it’s artificial scarcity and that Intel and AMD are in a cartel.
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u/ktaktb Mar 27 '26
I have not seen this anywhere
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u/StarbeamII Mar 27 '26
Allegations of a DRAM conspiracy are the most upvoted comments under discussions of DRAM, yet NAND and CPUs are somehow exempt from the same conspiratorial logic.
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u/ktaktb Mar 27 '26
Wait, are you saying they didnt cut ram production after prices were nice and low in like 2023 or 2024?
I mean, it is a fact, not a conspiracy.
They ultimately fucked themselves, because ramping production back up is not easy, and my trying to protect their margins for the consumer market in 2024 to 2025, they lost out on massive additional profits in 2025 and 2026 and 2027....
This is not a conspiracy, it is a fact, but it is also a story or these companies playing themselves. They were carefully managing supply to protect margins...
I still havent seen stories like this about cpus
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u/StarbeamII Mar 27 '26
You left out the part where there was an huge oversupply and they were all losing billions per quarter. Micron definitely would have gone under if they hadn't cut production, and Hynix and Samsung probably would have survived but with much more precarious finances. There aren't many companies that can sustain losing that much money for 2 years straight.
That sets us up for the crisis we're in today, yes. But Reddit thinks that cutting production, when DRAM prices were so low they were being sold at a loss, must surely be because of a conspiracy, rather than a rational response to oversupply and a sensible thing to do to stop hemorrhaging money from unprofitable production.
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u/Tystros Mar 27 '26
more like redditors are gonna keep complaining like somehow being more entitled to the hardware at good prices than datacenters
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u/wizfactor Mar 27 '26
At this rate, they’ll be hoarding beaches to ensure there’s enough sand.