Not that it hasn&t been anticipated for some time, but in recent days, many rumors from the past few months are being confirmed, and the word "storage crisis" is not entirely unexpected.
For instance, the delivery time for larger HDD orders is now said to have extended to 2 years. The next price-competitive alternative for data centers has therefore become QLC SSDs, which in turn is massively increasing the prices and demand for NAND storage.
Sharp Increase in Storage Prices - NAND and DRAM in High Demand Worldwide
But of course, the planned AI fortresses also require a lot of RAM. And not just more HBM memory, whose production capacities, according to manufacturers, are already sold out until the end of 2026. "Normal" DDR5 and GDDR7 memory chips are also becoming scarce, or their purchase prices are noticeably rising.
The reason for this is that manufacturing facilities are prioritizing the production of more expensive memory technologies for data centers because the margins there are generally significantly higher. At the same time, in addition to HBM, DDR5 and GDDR7 are increasingly being used in data centers.
An end to this price increase can therefore only be expected when global investment spending on data center construction subsides—however, this does not currently seem to be the case. If anything, these extreme expansion goals are being slowed down by other resources such as local power availability, but the largest IT companies currently seem to assume that these problems will be solvable in the short term and that all AI accelerators ordered today can be used in a year. We&ll see if the world will actually need as much "compute" for its AI demands as is currently planned to be built.
For one&s own IT equipment, this probably means stocking up on storage sooner rather than later that one intended to purchase sometime in the near future.
;)
