SSD shortages might hit hard in 2026 thanks to NVIDIA, AI

NVIDIA is currently the world’s most valuable company, and its wealth has largely been carried to the bank on the shoulders of AI datacenters powered by its GPUs. Refusing to slow down, NVIDIA unveiled a new Rubin supercomputing platform at CES 2026 consisting of six different chips, including a Vera CPU and a Rubin GPU.

The Rubin platform as a whole, as NVIDIA explains it, is ushering in a new “industrial” era of AI compute where costs are lower, and output is higher. Indeed, NVIDIA says the Rubin platform can offer 10x lower inference token costs while requiring 4x fewer GPUs when training mix-of-experts (MoE) models; that’s compared to the current Blackwell generation of hardware found in so many cutting-edge datacenters around the world.

Here come the screeching brakes, heard loudest by those who couldn’t care less about AI.

Last year ended in a dire situation for PC makers and consumers, and it’s continuing today — memory is being gobbled up by AI firms at an alarming rate, leaving only some scraps for the rest of us. It’s nigh impossible to build a new PC without dropping an enormous sum on RAM, and leading manufacturers are also starting to feel the squeeze.