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Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by johnvanommen on Saturday February 07, 2026 @05:53PM (#46929095)
> That implies combined hyperscaler cloud and AI revenue going from: $330B today to $1.2T within 3 years :-))

You’re ignoring the fact that gaming is going to the cloud.

That industry is bigger than Hollywood.

Desktop computers will invariably follow.

The RAM shortage will drive the transition.

For instance, my wife uses her personal laptop about four days a year.

People like that won’t be buying personal desktops or laptops, five years from now. The RAM shortage will drive a transition into thin clients.

I already see it with our kids. They use an iPhone, unless they need to type. Then they use an iPad with a BT keyboard.

Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by turtlesdown11 on Saturday February 07, 2026 @07:09PM (#46929795)
What amount of the gaming industry do you think will go to AI providers and not game developers?

You think we'll replace gaming and desktop computers into the cloud in the timeline of the poster above (2-4 years?)

Just not realistic.

Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by kg on Saturday February 07, 2026 @06:31PM (#46929458)
Even if gaming goes to the cloud, how are they going to run the massive existing library of video games on the dedicated AI inference hardware that everyone is buying right now? Seems like that pivot would require even more spending.
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by devmor on Saturday February 07, 2026 @07:05PM (#46929757)
And how are they going to get sub-5ms round trip latency into the average consumer’s home to avoid people continuing to see cloud gaming as a janky gimmick that feels bad to use?
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by qwertycrackers on Saturday February 07, 2026 @08:30PM (#46930409)
Cloud gaming is crap and any actual gamer will tell you that. The niche of gamers casual enough to not care about playing over network latency but serious enough to pay real money for cloud gaming is microscopic.
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by WarmWash on Saturday February 07, 2026 @09:43PM (#46930840)
>The niche of gamers casual enough to not care about playing over network latency

In the saddest way possible, the niche of gamers are people playing on desktops with ethernet connections.

The majority of gamers are buying booster packs on mobile games.

Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by int_19h on Sunday February 08, 2026 @02:16AM (#46932046)
Yes, but that majority doesn't need cloud gaming precisely because those games run just fine on their phone - there's no benefit in putting them in the cloud, that was supposed to be for fancy stuff where you need a beefy GPU for the eye candy.
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by toephu2 on Saturday February 07, 2026 @08:50PM (#46930544)
It's not 2023 anymore. Have you tried cloud gaming in 2026? I can barely tell it's connected to the cloud.
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by amlib on Saturday February 07, 2026 @09:32PM (#46930759)
Yes, it's amazing because it's streaming directly from a computer in the room behind me. :)
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by johnvanommen on Saturday February 07, 2026 @10:52PM (#46931180)
And the increases in network speed are one of the last bastions of Moores Law.
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by SJC_Hacker on Saturday February 07, 2026 @11:50PM (#46931398)
> nd the increases in network speed are one of the last bastions of Moores Law.

Throughput has increased but latency hasn’t changed much

Latency hasn’t decreased substantially since the late 90s when I remember getting sub 50 ms ping in Quake III from my dorm room in college

Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by jkrejcha on Sunday February 08, 2026 @05:55AM (#46933195)
I'm not surprised; you need a lot more servers and even so, there are a lot of places where something low ping times is difficult. While there is a lot of room for latency to go down, 1 lightmillisecond is ~300 km (~186 mi). This means that if a computer is 150 km away, 1 ms is the minimum ping allowed by physics, if I am talking directly to it.

By that yardstick, we've actually done very well in a lot of cases. :)

Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by flyinglizard on Sunday February 08, 2026 @05:56AM (#46933201)
Speed of light doesn't adhere to Moore's law :) and it's made worse by the fact most everyone connects via WiFi these days and it alone adds a few ms more.
Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by api on Saturday February 07, 2026 @09:46PM (#46930854)
The RAM shortage is extremely temporary. It’ll last as long as it takes for new capacity to come online. RAM shortages and price spikes have happened many times before.

Eventually China will catch up in EUV fabrication and flood the market with cheap silicon. When that happens a terabyte of RAM will cost what 128gb costs now.

Re:The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else by kmbfjr on Saturday February 07, 2026 @10:11PM (#46930975)
That may be true, but all of this can be done today without the massive capex and without “AI”.