Those skeptical are anticipating a possible large drop in demand before that backlog clears. ie. a change in market conditions that means that many of the orders in that backlog would be cancelled or belong to bankrupt entities.

Many words have already been spilled as to whether or not that might happen, so I'll just shrug rather than adding to them.

I think that a lot of people miss key aspects of the AI boom. Even discounting the skeptics, and the bubblers, crashers, etc.

There are a bunch of things that happen in parallel to the AI boom:

a) everyone and their mother is building out capacity. For each GB of VRAM installed, you generally want at least 1 GB of RAM, if not more. So just take nvda's numbers and go from there. And that's just for the GPU servers. But you also need ancillary services around GPU farms. You need some compute for filtering, preprocessing, you need data storage, and so on. And they're all RAM hungry processes.

b) RL is giving lots of capabilities improvements for AI, but it needs lots and lots of parallel runners for scenarios. Those runners need RAM. So every bit of non-GPU capacity is also being used, and more installed.

c) With increasing capabilities comes increasing usage. Everyone is deploying "agents" and those need to run somewhere, and they take RAM (especially the badly coded ones). There've also been reports of labs / big players hoovering up every mac available, for "agentic computer control" / training / whatever. That's on top of people buying them to run "24/7" stuff a la claw/hermes/etc.

In all of this, RAM is the bottleneck. And for the skeptics, you don't have to take hynix's word for it. Just look at the sales for CPUs / Mobos. They're down, because building a computer now is bottlenecked at RAM.

Same. There is huge, real demand for memory and storage everywhere you look. New capacity takes 3-5 years to come online. Every vendor has completely sold out capacity and is backlogged on top of that. This 5-year estimate is actually pretty realistic to me. I think we are stuck with high prices on these components for at least the next 3 years, minimum.

Agree. Also lots of suppressed demand at current prices. If prices return to anything like pre-AI, demand would grow dramatically.

Who are those ram bottleneck skeptics you’re referring to? I cannot see them. I don’t know anyone who isn’t aware the AI rollout is responsible for years to come of bottleneck of HBM and other hardware

Some of the backlogs apart from the "top level" one are not being viewed that positively from what I have heard. One of my football friends works at Vertiv's India office, soon transferring to Thane, they basically sell cooling infra for these hyperscalers. They have an insane amount of backlogs but because they are a "spoke" component, the backlog is super volatile. Like some power generation related delay or permit issue will randomly de-scale or cancel projects. And its really difficult to calculate risk of all that and maintain the book.

You've been here awhile, this forum is default incredibly skeptical and critical, especially when it comes to AI. It has been to their predictive detriment for many years now. AI bubble conviction is over 2 years now, $300b NVDA profits since. AI tool adoption has completely encompassed any tech savvy office and isn't going anywhere. Broken records.