This video hit home with me, working in IT, using AI, playing games and developing software. Hardware has become much harder to find and purchase, what is available has become a lot more expensive.
The absolute insane amount of money being invested into AI development and hosting is crazy, when comparing a rack of GPU servers to PS5’s here, Mrwhostheboss shows the scale of the hardware demands of AI and then how much of an impact is has on everything else.
The restrictions on hardware means consumers are being affected, badly. Simple memory kits are much higher cost than they used to be https://amzn.to/3TtvtPH for example. 16GB kits are now averaging £200+ when only last year the same memory could be had for half the price. Storage, Graphics Cards and RAM are all being impacted.
Then it goes a step further, with everyone’s move to the cloud for hosting, the cost of the cloud resources is going up as all the hyper-scalers are having to budget and cover costs of rapid data center build outs. That then impacts services across the board because of how much is now run in the cloud.
Whether the AI boom ultimately delivers on its promise remains to be seen. But one thing is already clear: the race to dominate artificial intelligence has become so important that some of the world’s biggest companies appear willing to take on extraordinary financial risk rather than risk being left behind. In today’s technology industry, staying in the race has become more important than balancing the books.