Almost 4 years ago I purchased an RTX 3090 for ~$750. Today, that same card has appreciated by roughly 2x. I also bought 2x 12TB SATA hard drives in perfect condition for ~$90 each about 2 years ago, which totals to about $180.
Nowadays you’re lucky to even find ONE drive in good confition for the price of those two drives I bought.

Similar story with memory and storage, the prices have all gone up substantially.

If this trend continues, will we be able to own our own computer hardware in the future?
Or will purchasing computers get so expensive that paying for computing as a service (CaaS) will be a cheaper alternative? (Nightmare scenario.)

What’s going on???

The demand for data centers capable of running Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence takes a significant amount of processing to create tangible outputs.
I firmly believe that in order for AI to succeed (long-term sustainability), we must optimize these high-end models for lower end hardware/make the algorithims more efficient.

I just hope that prices go back down for computing hardware.
If it weren’t for these price increases, I would’ve acquired more storage for my homelab’s NAS.

We’ll just have to wait and see for now.
My hope is that the AI bubble bursts, leading to lots of enterprise grade hardware flooding the used market at a significant discount.

My wallet and I WILL be ready to purchase a lot of that hardware for my homelab.