Western Digital has recently announced that it sold all of the year's hard-drive inventory to AI companies.

HTPC NZ

@campuscodi was looking for a 2.5" SSD last couple of weeks, at least in these parts of the world, it had already begun.

Ian

@campuscodi They've already surged. a 2TB Gen4 NVME SSD is more than 2x what it used to cost.

On the left is from November 2024, on the right is from now (February 2026)

Skjeggtroll

@louis @campuscodi

I don't see how. They've not needed market-bending amounts of HDDs to handle training sets before, and there's no magical font of new, multiple orders of magnitude larger datasets that's sprung forth recently.

Danielle Crawford

@campuscodi this is the IT equivalent of “drill, baby, drill” and it is so stupid

gary

@campuscodi the refurb mkt doesn't really care and dc pulls are going to happen and be a flood of parts - don't buy into fear, scarcity, urgency narrative, it is sort of exact opposite (eventually) #parts is parts

Chuck

@campuscodi Man the surplus market post crash is gonna be LIT!

AI6YR Ben

@ChuckMcManis @campuscodi LOL I'm swimming in old hardware, but now I am thinking of "diverting" disk drives out of my local e-waste bin 🤪

huntingdon

@campuscodi

Tech Bros buying all of Western Digital's HDD production for an entire year looks a lot less like a supply chain than an attempt to force people to live in their coercive AI world, which benefits only them.

MegatronicThronBanks

@campuscodi NO, no, no. Prepare for 30 different brands you'd never heard of before to come on the market, some of which will be quite good, and WD and the others to cry like little bitches.

Fluffy Kitty Cat

@campuscodi o wonder if there's gonna be a glut of hardware when the bubble pops

virgilpierce

@ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @campuscodi local university or government surplus auctions. They are too slow to update their policies to a supply crunch like this so for the first year as they continue with the old replacement schedule there will be some deals to be had.

Ben Zanin

@mirrorsandstuff @campuscodi WD makes spinning rust _only_. They split off the SSD part of the company last year, when SanDisk became its own independent legal entity again.

Zdeněk Doležal

@campuscodi může někdo říci že přínos AI odpovídá vynaloženým nákladům?

Oblomov

@megatronicthronbanks @campuscodi I hope this is a sarcastic jab at the purported self-balancing capabilities of capitalism.

Robert Gauld

@csstrowbridge @campuscodi same

Kevin Russell

@campuscodi

The bubble collapse can't come too soon.

小津 Ozu

@campuscodi because of the slop everything is expensive. Great. Just great.

gkrnours

@campuscodi ok but SSD price have already skyrocketed.