Oracle's recent force majeure invocation shines a spotlight on what seems to be an endemic problem: datacenter builders have been signing commitments to bring a certain amount of capacity online by a certain date, without first conducting sufficient due diligence about whether they would be able to secure all the resources needed to meet those commitments.

This means they are now caught in a mad scramble to source all sorts of stuff, including RAM, potentially as a matter of life and death.

What's less clear to me, though, is whether datacenter builders will be able to make good on these purchase agreements. It seems these projects have every opportunity to fail, and the path to success keeps getting narrower. What are the odds that chip manufacturers ultimately get caught holding a bag of chips that nobody can buy in one hand, and a bag of IOUs from bankrupt customers in the other?

Discussed yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49920932

Remember when software was eating the world? The gravy train ran out on commodity hardware and now we are paying the price for almost 3 decades of underinvestment.

Was at the computer store yesterday and the RAM I bought for $130 last year is now over $800.

Executives expecting $$ as usual