| ▲ | danlitt 2 hours ago | |
Not sure what you're getting at here. Hetzner has not spent 1 trillion dollars! | ||
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |
The exceptional capital investment is pushing up the cost of compute hardware, which is direct contributor into the costs of compute providers, pushing up their prices to customers. Crucial Memory, historically a retail RAM provider, closed to focus on AI compute sales, for example. Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137783 - December 2025 (392 comments) > “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. “Thanks to a passionate community of consumers, the Crucial brand has become synonymous with technical leadership, quality and reliability of leading-edge memory and storage products. We would like to thank our millions of customers, hundreds of partners and all of the Micron team members who have supported the Crucial journey for the last 29 years.” Micron is killing Crucial SSDs and memory in AI pivot to serve on AI companies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152915 - December 2025 (0 comments) > Secondly, the supply environment has changed permanently. AI infrastructure requires every single wafer with memory it can consume, something that has never happened with any industry megatrend previously. This means that every wafer Micron assigns to consumer parts is a wafer not going to a hyperscaler or enterprise contract. As a result, keeping a consumer line would directly limit Micron's ability to fulfill orders from its largest customers, which is a risk for profits and strategic relationships. So! Until this AI capital investment exuberance ends, compute hardware manufacturing pipelines are committed for years into the future, we're all bidding up the limited supply of compute for rent/lease, which in turn is constrained by the limited supply of compute hardware available for purchase. (at least in the scope of RAM, price fixing is also a potential component, but it'll take some time to determine how much of that is contributing to price inflation versus bona fide supply constraints: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/ram-crisis-one...) | ||