Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI

Kirby64

Not just motherboards. Cases, PC accessories (fans, etc), consumer SSDs, and more. Cases are especially hard hit, apparently, as they're already quite a low margin business. Personally, I see little reason to upgrade from my AM4 platform. It's never been easier to hold on to aging hardware with the advent of DLSS stretching older cards further, diminishing returns on the newer gen GPUs, and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.

xbmcuser

10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to actually reach on parity with node size. And sadly it looks like I was correct in my prediction.

lowbloodsugar

Shortage of ram and ssds, and soon, cpus. Motherboards aren’t selling because theres no point buying a motherboard if you can’t by the ram or ssd it needs. It’s brutal. I’ve just built a workstation with DDR4 and two-gen old cpu. I paid more for the ddr4 than it originally cost, four years ago. The same amount of ram for the latest motherboard would have been 10x ($10,000). So used DDR4 has gone through the roof, which impacts hobbyists who used to rely on “hand-me-downs”.

int32_64

The brief window between the covid gaming bubble pop/PoS ETH switch and the AI hardware blackhole will be fondly remembered as the last golden age of consumer PC hardware accessibility.

xg15

Waiting for the future where the only computing devices you can buy as a consumer are locked-down phones and PCs are simply not available anymore...

Giorgi

As an example?

TheRealPomax

"Fueled by greed". It would be trivial to say no to AI companies because dollars are dollars, it doesn't matter who pays them, and prioritizing literally all of humanity instead of "five companies" is a choice that every single supplier could make, but decided not to. This problem was 100% manufactured by suppliers.

iFred

High end resins and epoxies are in a critical supply shortage right now. I suspect that there are going to be some serious resource driven PCB shortages in the very near future.

palmotea

Maybe with AI we can finally kill user-owned computing, and make almost everyone renters. It's really wrong that the common people have access to things like PCs. It leaves a lot of money on the table the corporations can extract, and makes control much harder. PCs should cost at least as much as a car, so only the right people can afford them. Own nothing and be happy.

hackernudes

Will demand for computing ever go down from where it is now? Even if the AI bubble temporarily pops, in the long run I think the demand for computers will be practically infinite. Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.

2OEH8eoCRo0

We are in AI mania right now. I dont think this will continue forever.

overgard

I know it's going to be extremely painful, but the sooner this ridiculous unsustainable AI bubble pops the better off we'll be. The more it inflates the more collateral damage it will cause, and we're probably already looking at 2008 levels of financial chaos.

dghughes

I guess my hasty purchase meant as only a temporary, times were tight, placeholder Dell Inspiron in 2015 has to do me for another ten years.

himata4113

I was looking into self-hosting deekseek v4 pro since frankly cache reads are an absolute scam and they're 90% of the cost, but then I looked at the ROI and it will never pay off fast enough because the hardware will become obsolete faster even if you were running 10 token generation streams 24/7. The napkin math resulted that renting is around 27 times cheaper than owning (not including power). I think we're really screwed when it comes to having owned access to AI unless intel comes out swinging with a c series card that has 128gb vram so we can run them in a 4x128gb configuration, but seems unlikely since nvidia has a large share in them. This was calculated expecting around 30tok/s, of course you can get 2-5tok/s much much cheaper, but it's unusable for my workflow.

hx8

PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and individuals are either pushed towards closed hardware like Playstation, MacBooks, and Android devices or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.

kkfx

...just as the kleptocrats wanted, to stop the spread of self-hosting and desktop computing now that society is tentatively starting to go digital.

CrimsonCape

I assume manufacturers were making enough motherboards in 2025 to fulfill demand, so what happens when the demand is the same but the production is 25% less? Crazy.

jefurii

See Permacomputing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044638

vittore

poor Joe Rogan

asdfasgasdgasdg

I'm sure the AI shortages are hurting, but also I'm still using my same motherboard from 2020 and I see no reason why I should have to upgrade in the next 2-3 years (whenever I buy my RTX 7070Ti, it might be time, but maybe not even then).