> This is the real risk after the slow death of personal computing.

By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.

In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.

> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.

I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.

For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.

For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.

I work on a desktop, but as a backup I have bought a refurbished Dell Latitude, there are a lot of decent ones for €250 on eBay. Put Linux on it, it’s good enough for most workloads.

I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.

If the hyperscalers demand is persistent, more hardware players will notice and will want a piece of the pie. You already see non traditional players entering.

But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market

How do these prices compare to buying a PC in the early 90s?

This is a market shock. The reason it doesn't alleviate sooner is the chip manufacturers are very wary of investing billions on capacity that won't come online until after the shock is over and subsequently going bankrupt. Because that's happened before.

IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.

But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.

And I was told my whole life that capitalism solved everything through supply and demand magic.

I wish I could say I am disappointed.

Sadly this is not a joke nor some doomsday thinking. Google recently repurposed thousands of phones for server needs. Why? Well guess why… to teach everyone tis coming.