AI is currently used for scam websites, generating homework answers, surveillance, and making people look Charlie Kirk if he was African. How does this affect computers? AI requires powerful hardware. CPU’s thankfully are not being heavily affected as AI is relying on GPU’s, or graphics cards. However, since AI companies have run the market dry of powerful graphics cards such as the high-end RTX 40 and 50 series, they are turning towards SSDs (storage) and RAM (random access memory).
In the past 3 months, a 32GB stick of RAM cost at most $150 for the highest speeds, while nowadays, an average set of 2x16GB sticks will cost $400 or more. Currently. a single terabyte of storage would cost at most, $120 for the high-speed cards, while now, the high end 512GB cards, and mid-range 1TB cards cost $120-150. While before they would be at most $75.
Why is RAM important and what is it? Random Access Memory is what a laptop, phone, or console uses to access memory in a program that is currently running. When you work on something on top of a desk, then need to move towards something else, it’s better to have a big, heavily organized desk to access what is needed. Meanwhile an SSD is like a filing cabinet, the bigger it is, the more cabinets are needed.
So how are AI companies affecting the prices of these two components? By needing thousands of RAM sticks per warehouse, it drastically increases the demand of RAM while not increasing the supply. Un-used RAM is now difficult to supply, as there has not been any new innovations to increase the supply. So due to the demand suddenly skyrocketing, the price will rise with the demand.
How does this affect regular people? We need phones and computers for work and daily business. Phones and computers need storage and RAM, so because the material needed for these devices has more than doubled in price, the cost of the device will increase as well. For example: the Lenovo Legion 5, with a 14th generation i7 CPU, 1TB storage, RTX 4060, and 16GB of RAM, is priced at a SALE of $1714. The same Lenovo Legion 5 with a 14th generation i9, 1tb storage, RTX 4060, and 32GB of RAM was $1300 only a year ago. This unmarked price for the worse laptop is almost $600 more than the better model. The market is not looking any better in the near future, the only hope we would have for somewhat normal prices for computer components is to hope that LLM’s and Generative AI loses all of it’s usefulness and companies no longer profit from them.
