Ben Bajarin, an analyst at the market research company Creative Strategies, Inc., recently shared on social media that the tech behemoth was marketing lower-grade chips—those that would typically have been discarded—and that consumers were eagerly purchasing them despite their deficiencies.
This insatiable demand largely stems from AI. It began with GPUs, as data centers needed an astonishing quantity of them to perform the extensive parallel computations required by AI. Shortly afterwards, the storage supply began to exhibit stress signs, with prices escalating by hundreds of percent in some instances.
Currently, CPUs are struggling under the burdens that AI demand has placed on supply chains. CPUs vie for the same wafer real estate as the previously mentioned GPUs, and prioritizing GPU production has dramatically reduced CPU availability. At the same time, as AI has advanced, the demand for CPUs themselves has increased to manage complex AI tasks such as independent observation, learning, and taking action.