According to Taiwan tech publication DigiTimes, most AI firms are unwilling to wait two years for HDD supplies to stabilize and are shifting to SSDs instead. To contain costs, they are choosing QLC NAND-based drives over the faster, more durable, and more expensive TLC variants.

"Why does the population hate us? We're only completely destroying the consumer electronics market, accelerating climate change, aiming to eliminate countless jobs, increasing power costs, and stealing the works of millions of people to feed our system all so we can get even more obscenely wealthy? Please clap."

On the upside, we consumers get to have the superior TLC SSDs (better write durability).

Are now? Haven't they been using flash first?

Hard drives suck for that work load. Their seek times are huge, their throughput is awful, and they're worse storage density than HDDs. You can fit 24 2.5" ssds into a 2u server. 16TB in a 2.5" > 24TB in 3.5" SSDs were first to skyrocket in price vs HDDs.

You forgot to mention that the product they're sacrificing everything for is widely failing to meet expectations and that they will likely expect taxpayers to bail them out when their investments fail and threaten to take out the entire economy with themselves

A"I" companies want to store petabytes of "good" training data

I am start to think they are going on the acceleroism theory to push the society to the limits and destroy all for change

Some think this could lead to a more equallytary society, some wants to make a more centralized and controlled by one power sort of society, there is 2 different school of thought on this.

But we are clearly going to have big changes

To be clear, it only wildly fails to meet expectations in sectors that you hear about.

It's most definitely medium expectations in sectors you don't hear about because news and social media have a huge negativity bias because that gets views and engagement.

If we want to fight this scourge, we need to be more informed about it.

Like what sectors?

Law enforcement and military

I certainly expect that the visual models are meeting expectations in the racial profiling department.

Compared to microns?

https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2026/01/05/Heber-City-Police-Department-AI-program-officer-frog/9641767634540/

Doesn't seem to be meeting expectations in that sector either.

Assuming that the chip manufacturers don't drop TLC production to fill AI orders.

No. AI companies have huge storage requirements for training data. Flash storage is not cost efficient for mass storage quantities.

For massive companies space is as costly as the price of the storage. Especially these AI companies don’t care much about the price of things.

Something tells me you’ve never worked for a massive company.

Back to punch cards we go. Or are they hoarding paper too?

These aren't massive companies. They're startups. (and some branches inside of massive companies acting like startups)

Oh yeah I just read how AI keeps suggesting nuking everyone. That sounds like a great success. (I get what you mean, I just wanted to be a wiseass)

the consumer hardware market is so tiny. It has almost no buying power or pull. Its hard to expect them to cater to it when its single digit % of their overall sales.

Contact centers, software development, automation, images and video analysis, data analysis, semantic search, entity recognition, advertising, misinformation campaigns, social media, security scanning & automation...etc

Many of these are cross-cutting across many sectors, some of these are sectors you don't think of as they are driven by government entities.

And many of these have boring quiet tools and integrations that you don't hear about because they "just work".

You only hear about the shit that doesn't work. Not the shit that does work.

Edit: inb4 a reply of a narrow use case or shitty implementation that, obviously, doesn't work, which I already called out as a bias.

I think it's more like expectations have been deliberately lowered in those fields to meet exactly what AI can deliver. Unpredictable, arbitrary, non-negotiable decisions are the point, and the goal. It's not about enforcing any laws or achieving any actual outcome other than making innocent people fear for their lives. And it's doing a fine job at that.

Bruh, you’re the one who called them massive companies

Also in a few years when the AI generated nonsense code reaches a critical point and a ton of important systems grind to a halt, we'll expect all of you that we fired to come back and un-fuck it for us so we can keep on making money. On temporary contracts and at reduced wages of course because times are tough.

"This just in. Panic buying of paper has led to shortages in timber, resulting in another round of toilet paper scarcity."

Let's hope not

TLC is the technology, not the manufacturer. TLC means three bits per cell, versus QLC which has 4 bits per cell. Every extra bit the cell has to store exponentially reduces its write cycle.

Next year's CES is gonna be every AI product from this year's CES but with no progress on release date because they can't even buy the consumer grade hardware to produce it since it all went into data centers lol.

I have one in my basement

Didn't forget draining all their drinking water. Violating everyone's copyright. Driving teens to suicide. Giving terrible medical advice. And Generating csam.

Tariffs already gutted the barley starting to recover from the pandemic wood shortage.

... it's Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Facebook building all these huge datacenters. The biggest companies on the planet

Exabytes. Petabytes are easily surpassed by a lot of companies these days.

Man, fuck those guys

It's a mystery!

I have a feeling, that the tech sector has enough kompromat on a lot of important people to keep the bubble from bursting.

How do we make the AI firms bankrupt faster?

Most of these aren't generative AI, tho?

At this moment I am seriously considering if we mayhaps need a tool that automatically queries the AI tools with random garbage just to eat up their budget.

That counts as usage, they'll use it to convince investors.

Evaporative cooling. They're trying to save on their electric bills by not using AC. Or sometimes they're cooling the AC condensers themselves this way.

The amount of heat generated is so large they can't properly cool it with a closed loop system.

It is useless to play this game against them. All the top players are already in.^[they have won against local textiles in almost all places and against little food industries in enough places. They start by destroying the incentive to produce locally and continue with centralising the means of production. All the while, using the fruits of your labour against you. Eventually they want to destroy your ability to walk away, by being the only option everywhere.]
Best, find your own way to create ICs and make them for community purposes.
There will be much less money and you will be tempted to sell to AI chaps, so you will need willpower.
Specially after putting the time and effort to manufacture yourselves.

It does somewhat feel like all the levers of power are in the hands of people who have little to no reliance on the consumer market anymore. Your money is no good here.

They can all enjoy the perfect financial circlejerk with most of the world's money whilst the rest of us scratch at the window.

Yeah, that's kinda like trying to DDoS a Cloudflare protected server in hopes that they would drop Cloudflare.

And clean water just reduces duct maintenance costs.

But at double the price that they were a few months ago.

scratch at the window

I have read this thing 2 times today and I can't find a meaning for this.
What does this idiom mean?

It's an old saying, longer version I know is:

"Saddest thing in the world is a cat scratching at the window because it used to be an inside cat."