this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Yeah that's happened before, with both memory and hard drives. A flood in Thailand caused HDD shortages and price spikes for a year or two around 2012, and there was a similar situation with DRAM some years earlier. There have also been GPU and SSD shortages due to cryptocurrency idiots. This may just be more of the same.
In capitalism, if the demand is outstripping supply then eventually higher prices will command greater investment and the eventual return to normalcy of the supply vs demand curve. In theory it is more of the same, but how prolonged it will be will be dependent on when the AI supply/demand curve achieves normalcy.
Some of the shortages have been due to supply interruptions, like the hard drive factory getting flooded, or similarly with a DRAM factory catching on fire. I don't know what happened after the Chia lunacy (Chia was a crypto currency that consumed vast amounts of SSD space and destroyed the SSD's through extreme write wear) but prices did normalize after a while. I know that Chia was the final straw that got Hetzner to ban crypto mining on its hardware outright. Previously, it was forbidden on VPS's but allowed on dedicated servers. Anyway it caused a temporary shortage of both SSD and hard drives.