A warning. I'm gonna get on my soapbox here so pass unless you want an old woman's opinion on this.
I agree that the ones most affected will be gamers who want the latest, greatest, fastest, biggest, and now most expensive ram packages and GPU cards out there. They better be prepared to pay more to play. What's going to affect normies the most is storage prices; at least normies like me whose income is limited who will have to make do with what we got.
Some smaller OEMs might well shut their doors sooner than later and the larger OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc will be forced to make major changes in the way they operate for the consumer market just to be able to sell home devices. But in this game, companies like those are not big players anymore. They're small fish and can easily become causalities, too.
Regulars here will know this, but others may not. People think there are many computer memory companies (DRAM and flash) worldwide, but there's really only three primary semiconductor companies, often referred to as the "Big Three"; Samsung and Hynix are in South Korea, Micron in the US.
Other companies produce memory modules or controllers, but these three are the core manufacturers of the actual memory chips themselves. Micron is jumping ship to AI, so it's probably a good bet the other two will as well and it's all to whomever will pay the most and that's not the consumer. Big money is greasing these wheels.
Brands, such as Corsair, G.Skill, Kingston, ADATA, and PNY, manufacture the complete memory modules (e.g., RAM sticks for a PC) but purchase the actual integrated memory circuits (ICs or chips) from one of the big three. Some of these may also become casualities before it's all over.
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm on a roll here and do have my own theory about these AI data centers. AI will eventually rule the world as we know it. It's going to change everything. It's going to control everything. Building these data centers around the world is all about power.....world dominating power, not competition. No one will convince me that it's just MS, Google, Amazon, Musk, et al building these centers independently of each other.
It makes me wonder exactly who is in cahoots with whom to do all this greasing and if anyone, anywhere is monitoring what the final outcome could be.
Probably not because pockets will be greased every step of the way with lots & lots of money. We already know in some places, there is water and power shortages for the public because it's all going to these data centers. For God's sake, they're resurrecting 3 Mile Island nuclear power plant strictly for Microsoft to get 100% of its production. That ought to say something.
To me that's scary, not progress. Look at the condition of other parts of the world that lacks infrastructure.
Many of us here won't live to see it all come together so I guess we don't have to worry about it, but just stop and think about its possible implications for future generations.
Ok, that's my last rant of 2025. Happy New Year, boys and girls.
