I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen.
Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead.
Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.
They have seen boom and bust cycles previously and are understandably wary of expanding capacity for expected demand that may fizzle. If they stay too conservative, China’s CXMT is chomping at the bit to eat their lunch, backed by the Chinese government, but that’s not going to help until late 2027 at best.
How much capital would you invest in a capacity expansion for a trend that may or may not yet be durable? Now, how much would you invest when there are two major state-backed chinese entities that essentially aren't allowed to go bankrupt and have infinity money are competing with you?
Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while.
Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.
High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed from usable performance.
Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to mention most game devs are targeting an install base of $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the 5090 exists.
That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From the developers' point of view there's not much point raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.
I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen.
Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead.
Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.
They have seen boom and bust cycles previously and are understandably wary of expanding capacity for expected demand that may fizzle. If they stay too conservative, China’s CXMT is chomping at the bit to eat their lunch, backed by the Chinese government, but that’s not going to help until late 2027 at best.
How much capital would you invest in a capacity expansion for a trend that may or may not yet be durable? Now, how much would you invest when there are two major state-backed chinese entities that essentially aren't allowed to go bankrupt and have infinity money are competing with you?
If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.
Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while.
Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.
High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed from usable performance.
Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to mention most game devs are targeting an install base of $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the 5090 exists.
That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From the developers' point of view there's not much point raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.