{"id":14989,"date":"2025-12-23T09:28:53","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T16:28:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/?p=14989"},"modified":"2025-12-23T09:28:53","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T16:28:53","slug":"your-laptop-is-about-to-become-a-casualty-of-the-ai-grift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/2025\/12\/23\/your-laptop-is-about-to-become-a-casualty-of-the-ai-grift\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Laptop Is About To Become a Casualty of the AI Grift"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is an interesting article on how the irrational rush for AI data centers is going to harm your ability to buy laptops, also desktops and phones. So as they build out AI data centers, they’re going to juice you for computers like the automobile industry is juicing people who buy their inferior and extremely overpriced products. You’d have to think they know the global financial crash is inbound, and they’re scheming maximum wealth transfers right up until it happens (post<\/a> about how they’re juicing farmers into bankruptcy). Consequently, I wouldn’t pay the premium price, as you can pick up quality machines refurbished, flash libreboot and a Linux distro of your choice to be off and running. And you can also pick up a refurbished Pixel and put Graphene OS on it for a phone. And you have to think the rush for AI data centers everywhere is for the mark of the beast system and the unveiling of Antichrist within just a few years. Maranatha!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.theblaze.com\/columns\/opinion\/your-laptop-is-about-to-become-a-casualty-of-the-ai-grift<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

By Daniel Horowitz<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Dreams of artificial general intelligence are killing the tools that actually run the US economy \u2014 all thanks to bad government policy.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Welcome to the techno-feudal state, where citizens are forced to underwrite unnecessary and harmful technology<\/a> at the expense of the technology they actually need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The economic story of 2025 is the government-driven build-out of hyperscale AI data centers<\/a> \u2014 sold as innovation, justified as national strategy, and pursued in service of cloud-based chatbot slop and expanded surveillance. This build-out is consuming land, food, water, and energy at enormous scale. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright bluntly put it, \u201cIt takes massive amounts of electricity to generate intelligence. The more energy invested, the more intelligence produced.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortages will hit consumers hard in the coming year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That framing ignores what is being sacrificed \u2014 and distorted \u2014 in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the destruction of rural communities<\/a> and the strain placed on national energy capacity<\/a>, government favoritism toward AI infrastructure is warping markets. Capital that once sustained the hardware and software ecosystem of the digital economy is being siphoned into subsidized \u201cAI factories,\u201d chasing artificial general intelligence instead of cheaper, more efficient investments in narrow AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to fiscal, monetary, tax, and regulatory favoritism, the result is free chatbot slop and an increasingly scarce, expensive supply of laptops, phones, and consumer hardware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subsidies break the market<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For decades, consumer electronics stood as one of the greatest deflationary success stories in modern economics. Unlike health care or education \u2014 both heavily monopolized by government \u2014 the computer industry operated with relatively little distortion. From December 1997 to August 2015, the CPI for \u201cpersonal computers and peripheral equipment\u201d fell 96%. Over that same period, medical care, housing, and food costs rose between 80% and 200%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That era is ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI data centers are now crowding out consumer electronics. Major manufacturers such as Dell<\/a> and Samsung are scaling back or discontinuing entire product lines because they can no longer secure components diverted to AI chip production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prices for phones and laptops are rising sharply. Jobs tied to consumer electronics \u2014 especially the remaining U.S.-based assembly operations \u2014 are being squeezed out in favor of data center hardware that benefits a narrow set of firms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is policy-driven distortion, not organic market evolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through initiatives like Stargate and hundreds of billions in capital pushed toward data center expansion, the government has created incentives for companies to abandon consumer hardware in favor of AI infrastructure. The result is shortages that will hit consumers hard in the coming year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are retooling factories to prioritize AI-grade silicon for data centers instead of personal devices. DRAM production is being routed almost entirely toward servers because it is far more profitable to leverage $40,000 AI chips than $500-$800 laptops. In the fourth quarter of 2025, contract prices for certain 16GB DDR5 chips rose nearly 300%<\/a> as supply was diverted. Dell and Lenovo<\/a> have already imposed 15%-30% price hikes on PCs, citing insatiable AI-sector demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chip crunch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The situation is deteriorating quickly. DRAM inventory levels are down 80%<\/a> year over year, with just three weeks of supply on hand \u2014 down from 9.5 weeks in July. SK Hynix expects shortages to persist through late 2027<\/a>. Samsung has announced it is effectively out of inventory<\/a> and has more than doubled DDR5 contract prices to roughly $19-$20 per unit. DDR5 is now standard across new consumer and commercial desktops and laptops, including Apple MacBooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Samsung has also signaled it may exit the SSD market<\/a> altogether, deeming it insufficiently glamorous compared with subsidized data center investments. Nvidia has warned<\/a> it may cut RTX 50 series production by up to 40%, a move that would drive up the cost of entry-level gaming systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shrinkflation is next. Before the data center bubble, the market was approaching a baseline of 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSDs for entry-level laptops. As memory is diverted to enterprise customers, manufacturers will revert to 8GB systems with slower storage to keep prices under $999 \u2014 ironically rendering those machines incapable of running the very AI applications they\u2019re working on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Real innovation sidelined<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The damage extends beyond prices. Research and development in conventional computing are already suffering. Investment in efficient CPUs, affordable networking equipment, edge computing, and quantum-adjacent technologies has slowed as capital and talent are pulled into AI accelerators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is precisely backward. Narrow AI \u2014 focused on real-world tasks like logistics, agriculture, port management, and manufacturing \u2014 is where genuine productivity gains lie. China understands<\/a> this and is investing accordingly. The United States is not. Instead, firms like Roomba, which experimented with practical autonomy, are collapsing \u2014 only to be acquired by the Chinese<\/a>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not a free market. Between tax incentives, regulatory favoritism, land-use carve-outs, capital subsidies, and artificially suppressed interest rates, the government has created an arms race for a data center bubble China itself is not<\/em> pursuing. Each round of monetary easing inflates the same firms\u2019 valuations, enabling further speculative investment divorced from consumer need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hype over utility<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As Charles Hugh Smith recently noted<\/a>, expanding credit boosts asset prices, which then serve as collateral for still more leverage \u2014 allowing capital-rich firms to outbid everyone else while hollowing out the broader economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pattern is familiar. Consider the Ford plant in Glendale, Kentucky, where 1,600 workers were laid off<\/a> after the collapse of government-favored electric vehicle<\/a> investments. That facility is now being retooled to produce batteries for data centers<\/a>. When one subsidy collapses, another replaces it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are trading convention for speculation. Conventional technology \u2014 reliable hardware, the internet, mobile computing \u2014 delivers proven, measurable utility. The current investment surge into artificial general intelligence is based on hypothetical future returns propped up by state power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good old laptop is becoming collateral damage in what may prove to be the largest government-induced tech bubble yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is an interesting article on how the irrational rush for AI data centers is going to harm your ability to buy laptops, also desktops and phones. So as they build out AI data centers, they’re going to juice you for computers like the automobile industry is juicing people who buy their inferior and extremely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14991,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14989\/revisions\/14991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}