The AI industry continues to gobble up manufacturing resources that were once dedicated to serving PC, smart device, and gadget makers. We’ve seen huge demand/supply driven price rises in RAM, GPUs, SSDs, and more through 2026. Now that most basic and unglamorous electronics necessity, the PCB, looks set to join them. A news report published by Nikkei Asia quotes several leading PC and PCB industry managers, making it clear we are going to see PCB (and PCB subcomponent) shortages and price rises in the coming months.
What makes it even better is they bought up all the existing equipment for data centers that aren’t even built. And a lot of them won’t be. And by the time they are, what’s been bought and piled up in warehouses, will be obsolete and need replacement. Before it’s ever taken out of the box.
It’s by design. Altman literally bought the wafers themselves. We need laws to protect against this, and also a serious law with criminal liability for the destruction of it.
Once it comes the time, it will be better for them to destroy the GPUs and ask for more bailout money than to put them on eBay for cheap. The end game is a monopoly, this is just the first step. They can’t let prices go back down afterwards either.
In a normal non-bubble world it would just be considered anti-competitive practices. Also typically it’s not possible to do this, as it’s like lighting a pile of money on fire and a single company can’t afford to buy everything to starve their competition of infrastructure. A private business would vote that moron out, and a public one does the same with shareholder votes.
The problem was irrational exhuberance and everybody doing it everywhere. It self corrects eventually with the public likely eating the losses… but the hardware itself is marked down, discounted, and liquidated just the same so it’ll restore the market for components that way.
That’s the plan, so they can sell you Raspberry Pi 1-tier hardware on an HDMI stick, that you can “just plug into your TV or monitor, and rent a real powerful PC from the cloud, and never worry about obsolescence”, as they dreamed about it since 2012.
Which means I can buy 32GB+ accelerator cards for peanuts on Ebay to run DS4.1 or Qwen3.8 at home on my own machines.
Same with memory eventually despite the memory cartel trying to prevent it from happening. Once demand implodes for GPUs, so does this synthetic demand for so much HBM, which means a pivot back into consumer memory and normal server RAM…
At least we can bask in all the CEOs being fired for not having a better Quarter after it crashes and they need the consumers to save their asses again. We will never consume as much as fake AI data centres.
All this shit was going to be put in warehouses and likely won’t ever even see a data centre. They know this isn’t true demand for a product driving their costs. It’s all completely fake. If it weren’t, the likes of Musk’s xAI wouldn’t be selling their extra compute to their competitors. They’ve already covered all the current usage, and excess, so why do they need more data centres at all?
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Nvidia backstopping coreweave by renting capacity nvidia doesnt need from coreweave so coreweave can justify demand for nvidia GPUs
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Customers being forced to take delivery of preordered GPUs that now sit in warehouses, which will age out, and will eventually be in my home server rack some day 😘
You can’t have both those things happening while publicly claiming demand is high and justifies planned capacity. The fire sales are going to be epic… 2001 massively overbuilt fiber which got auctioned off for peanuts. This bubble doesn’t really have lasting infrastructure to auction off besides unused hardware i’ll be able to buy for cheap.
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LLMs are still mostly useless, unless you want to fry your brain. The people that claim “moderate usage is the way to go” are just like the “I only drink one beer a day” alcoholists. Sure they don’t get so drunk every day they’re trashing pubs and the likes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not addicted.
Wow, it’s just literally anything related to computer and server components now, not just particular specialized components. This fucking sucks.
Is PCBWay pivoting to the “let’s print some money” strategy too, or are they trying to reserve some capacity so as to not completely fuck non-enterprise customers?
More to the point, how is it even possible to cause such a shortage? PCBs aren’t even particularly high-tech the way the chips are; a determined enthusiast could make them at home.
And I don’t mean just etching the circuits: I mean you could get some fiberglass, copper foil, and epoxy resin, and laminate your own from scratch.
They bought the manufacturing capacity.
But it doesn’t cost billions of dollars and several years to spin up new manufacturing capacity for freaking PCBs.
This shortage should sort itself out much sooner than the memory crisis.
use this.
The bubble is driving up the costs of everything with this artificial demand causing artificial scarcity. There is nothing rational about this.
Fuck AI even more!
