556
Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
(www.tomshardware.com)
Me running old Asus B350 AM4 Board from 2017...
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
556 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
84433 readers
4014 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
When is the best time to buy pc parts? Should I still wait?
If you need it for work/self now - best time is now, if you don't need it for now - later.
Speculating for necessary items (even with rental bullshit) won't help you most likely, and would just add mental pain.
Can always buy used, and older, if that works for you (though the prices are ridiculously also high)
I know you're just a person but when do you think prices might go back down? I feel like we're looking at a decade out honestly
We're mainly just waiting for the AI bubble to pop, and it's looking more and more likely every day as companies are slowly realising the only people that like AI are the companies selling the solutions.
Idk man. Shit's so wild, they might never go down (fascism, ww3, complete meltdown of capitalistic markets due to french revolution levels of incompetent wealth inequality in some specific third world country out in the west, or some wild interpolation of them all).
Or they might go down next week when some specific big AI company starts selling off datacenter parts (get ready for dirt cheap racks)
Though, with datacenter parts, problem is, they're mostly completely useless for consumers, because of hardware vendor lock in, most likely.
I guess in the end, I am happy I bought more storage space, gpu, and replacement cpu when I needed it, even if it seemed a bit high (now it's cosmic)
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting. They tried with Stadia to get people to play games hosted in the cloud, but that was never going to fly.
With the compute demands of AI (which is comparable to a AAA game except for the largest models), they dont want to make the same mistake and let you have the compute. They see this as an oppurtunity for subscription fees for the earth.
The fact that we cant get hardware for a reasonable price is an added bonus to this plan.
All of this only works of everyone subscribes to this shit. Businesses will, because its just easier to manage it. Consumers though should not give in. If you want to run an agent, use a small local model.
The best thing that can be done is to make local open source agents and models approachable for regular users. Right now, they arent.
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting.
Thankfully there's a growing number of businesses that have been burned by this, and it seems like companies are starting to try bringing their critical systems back in-house again
There is this tipping point where it becomes more cost effective to bring it inhouse, even with the staffing requirements. For small to medium sized buinesses though cloud all the way.
So there's more supply than demand, meaning they should become really cheap. Right? That's fucking good news.
What collapse are you talking about? Profit collapse for greedy corporations?
Sure, you may be able to buy a cheaper motherboard for a while. But you'll pay through the nose to populate it, hence the falling motherboard sales.
If they get dirty cheap, I might just replace my old one using old parts
I have a home server waiting around for an SSD for a year now. I have the money, but I don't like feeling like I'm getting scammed. So I'd rather wait for this market to collapse than give them my money.
Can we create a fund with gamers, and then buy the manufacturers that go under?
We need just one of each, MB, PS, GPU, hopefully something for CPU will be buyable as well.
For CPU and GPU, our options are mostly TSMC, Samsung and Intel. Nvidia and AMD don't really have fabs. Any of those can also help with the other chips on a motherboard. Samsung also do NAND so they'd be the best to acquire.
I think Samsung is going to get hit with helium shortages which are needed in fab, outside of hormuz the US is the only one with a locked supply
I was originally thinking of grabbing parts as they go on sale finally (this PC is from 2018ish, I think, and I guess I could upgrade some bits), but I think I'm just going to wait and get a laptop. In part because I do less gaming, the gaming is less intense, and I'm thinking about trying to spend part of the year living outside of Japan which would make the logistics of shipping a heavy full tower around (or even mid if I downsized) just too much of a headache. Still not 100% sure, though.
right before mother's day as well! smh.
Reaper going from door to door meme
THE COLLAPS HAS BEGUN!
...if i understand it correctly?
How has this whole saga not been an obvious indictment of 'the free market?'
Big players shouldn't be allowed to gobble up all the resources needed by small ones. How is it not obvious that they need to wait until production increases to meet their needs before embarking on their little project?
There is no Free Market, that's just a myth they tell us to allow them to do whatever they want. They don't really want a true Free Market because it leads to Luigis.
The free market means the market is free to fuck you. Yes you in particular 😅
mankind's oldest trade, but doesnt compare to the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
No this is exactly what the free market is. Regulations that make things fairer for small people is communism.
What about regulations that make things fairer for tall people?
You mean tallmunism?
That’s a whataboutism.
Then give me communism bc this free market shiz aint it. Giving us the scraps that AI doesn't want is just nuts if we get anything at all. Esp since no one beyond billionaires want this ai crap
It's like a dozen people gaming ever one else for the rest of the chairs on the Titanic.
They want to buy the dip
Who knew cartels were bad for markets? I am sure economists and regulators were screaming at legislators for years but I guess they couldn't hear them over the sound of the bags of dirty lobbyist money landing on their desks.
And then there are the financial "irregularities" funding the AI boom which are also not getting any attention.
Who knew cartels were bad for markets? I am sure economists and regulators were screaming at legislators for years
Unfortunately there's plenty of economists that still believe in hardcore libertarianism, which is what led to our current situation
AI is an amazing tool for fascists.
Annihilate private access to computing, censor and rewrite all comms, destroy free software and the last remnants of education...
Every single decision made for evil.
And all these vendors who are locking themselves into one customer are about to learn why that's a bad idea.
AI is used as propaganda tools to spread it, and it can bee seen on youtube, social media quite readily. plus it sexualizes victims to like csam, and festishized unattainable "women" for conservatives.
conservaties pretty much buys into/believes in anything that is scammy.
The worst thing is that when used for good AI is fantastic! Scientific progress with purpose built AI to find planets, predict the weather, and tons of pattern matching has been in use for decades with positive benefits!
Even LLMs can be a useful tool in the right situations where looking like words people would say but accuracy is NOT important.
The problem is trying to use LLMs to do everything and failing while running the tech industry, the environment, and soon the economy into the ground. They took something positive, ruined it and coopted the terminology while shoving it down everyone's throats.
Sorry but I'm so done with hearing about how cool and useful the knife that they're plunging into our necks is.
Maybe try reading my comment again?
load more comments
(39 replies)
view more: next ›