Beyond the DDR Shortage: How Global Events Affect Hardware

 In this episode of Act on Tech, Alex continues the conversation on the DDR RAM shortage by looking at the bigger picture—how global events impact the hardware we rely on every day. Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and behind every computer, server, and network is a complex global supply chain affected by materials, logistics, and geopolitical instability. From industrial resources like helium and other gases used in chip manufacturing to the effects of global conflicts and shifting supply chains, Alex breaks down how these factors influence availability, pricing, and production priorities. This episode helps small business owners and IT professionals understand why hardware shortages happen and why they can’t always be controlled. If you rely on stable systems for your business, understanding the bigger picture will help you plan better, avoid surprises, and make smarter technology decisions. For reliable IT support and long-term technology planning, visit www.alexcustomtech.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Are you ready to make technology work for you? Tune in to Act on Tech, the podcast where we break down the latest tech trends and show you how to boost your productivity at home and in your business. So, subscribe to Act On Tech today and visit AlexCustomTech.com to see how we can take your business to the next level. That's Act On Tech, your guide to smarter tech for a smarter business. Alex Custom Tech, IT means integrity and trust.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Hi, hello. Welcome to Act on Tech where we talk all things technology. I am Alex of Alex Custom Tech, and today we're gonna talk about the DDR RAM shortage. But this is part two, it's kind of like a follow-up to what we just talked about in the last episode. And like I said, I glanced over it to kind of give you uh what DDR RAMs are and what we're talking about when we're talking about the shortage, and I kind of maybe I've given you a little bit of my philosophy about economics and how economics works because like I'm not on the bandwagon with everybody else saying oh there's a shortage and companies are evil and and that kind of stuff. I'm taking a more of a taking a step back and more of a comprehensive view of what's going on, right? So we're gonna follow up now with the with the next episode in this three-part mini-series, if you will. It's just now we're gonna talk about you know, beyond the DDR shortage, you know, how global events affect hardware, and we'll talk about global effects, talk about like conflicts in different countries and stuff like that, how that affects the shortages or manufacturing of anything that we need as a hardware component in computers, right? So when we when we unpack that, right, we're talking about supply chains, right? So, you know, here is someone to talk about that in this episode. So, like I said, in the last episode, we talked about DDR RAM shortage and how how many how the memory manufacturers are shifting to DDR5 and AI infrastructure. So, we probably know about AI stuff, and and I'm living I live in Pennsylvania, so there's a couple of um server farms being developed right now. We're gonna be housing the servers that run these DDR5 memory inside the server, because that's how they're able to capitalize on the power of AI, because that's how it does its computing and and and so on and so forth. So the so the GPU that's inside these servers one run the DDR5, and that's kind of what it is, because that's a that's the that's the what the servers need to run the AI models in a runabout way, right? So man some manufacturers are are shifting to that, right? DDR4 is very powerful too, but that's normally what's in your computer and your laptop and and so on and so forth, but again, because of the AI, they're kind of shifting to that, and then you know, DDR4 becomes expensive because they're not really making them as much as they used to make them anymore, and that's a problem, right? So, but today we want to take a step back though and look at something bigger, right? So, because of hardware shortage, because because hardware shortage doesn't just happen because companies decide they're gonna change the direction, right? They also happens because of global supplies. So we're talking about you know, you know, global chain, global supplies, and and global conflict, right? So instability like what's going on right now in the Middle East, uh, believe it or not, could affect a matter of fact, not could affect, is affecting what we're talking about, right? Definitely, right? So the hidden supply chain. So you guys are not you guys are aware of how of how things get to you, like you know that there is a truck that that delivers the the items that you want to the stores or or maybe Amazon takes it to your house, okay? But there's a whole supply chain behind that, and I remember coming across this when I read Um Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, and he talks about a pencil and the number two pencil that you have in your hand when you do your testes with. I remember doing a lot of those when I was in Jamaica. I have to do use number two pencil for do this something called common interest exam. That's what you have to do when you're in grade like five or six, so you can progress to the next stage in your academic career in a number two pencil. But number two pencil has the the the you know the little rubber on the top and the eraser, and then inside of it is a lead that you used to write. And I would just have the pencil, use the pencil, not think about how that came to me so I can do my tests. And he gave me this in the book, he gave you this long explanation about you know timber and and and and the guys cutting the timber, and it goes into the manufacturer and then they shit the timber down and they put it together and they get the lead, kind of to mine the lead out of the out of the wherever the mining is, they gotta get that, and and I gotta go through a bunch of chemical processes, and then everything comes together, and it goes into the pencil, and they put it together, and then the pencil goes on a truck, and then the truck goes to a store, and then yada yada. So that's that's a supply chain, right? And he used he talks about how the prices of each of those parts that the pencil needs is communicated to the manufacturer through through prices, not through somebody telling somebody else that we could just gotta raise the price of this or that, and also he talks about how the people who are doing the timber might not would not necessarily be friends with the guy that's mining the the the the um the lead, but they are still working together because of economics and how economics works. So these are the mindset that I take into thinking about the hardware that we are using in technology, all of it comes from all over the world coming together to go into your computer so it works. So if one of those things, one of those supply chains gets disrupted, it's gonna trickle down, right? So that being said, that's like a synopsis. Like, if you really want to know about how this stuff, read read the read free to choose from Milton Friedman. Friedman is a freaking brilliant dude, all right. And people think that computers are the simple products, like simple products are your desk, kind of like I felt about the buttons about pencil, but really your computer is built off from components sourced all over the world, right? And memory is memory from one country chip fabricated, right? In another place. So the memory is fabricated in another it comes from one place and the matter of fact in another place, right? And source and from whatever else, from whatever else in the world it comes from, right? So basically, what I'm trying to say is that the chip that we call DDI5 or DDR4, it comes from different different mining places, and there's there's other things that come together just to get you that one chip, right? And memory from other countries and chips and fabrication and other in other materials sources from elsewhere, and then everything assembles somewhere else, completely different from where it actually originated from, and it's a global system, and the system is very sensitive to disruptions. That's kind of a going around a long way, just to say that one thing, right? So when it comes to industrial material, and I mentioned this in the last one, like helium and others, right? One thing most people don't think about is the material required in the manufacturing of chips. So when we just talk about silicon and silicon valley, or silicon, talk about silicon valley all the time. We are talking about industrial gases like helium, neon, and other things that are used to manufactured in the manufacturing process. These materials are critical and not critical, very very important in the process, in the cooling and the precision environment that you need to create a chip. Right? And maintaining stability with these other materials like the helium and neon is very crucial to this whole this whole process. Very, very important to this whole process. Very, very critical, critical to this whole process. And if the supply if the supply or the supply or the supply chain get broken on in any are is unstable in any way, the manufacturer becomes more the money the product becomes more expensive, and you know where we are, or some things or some are it might get to your slower, or or you know, all the things that come from that one disruption in that in that product in that supply chain. So in a in a runabout way, that's how the current events going on affects how things play out, right? So conflict in different parts of the world is can affect and will affect the access and resources and transportation and transportation routes and energy supply of what we're of what we need in the computers and in the servers and all this other stuff, right? So what happens? It doesn't just affect oil and gases, and that's what people need to understand. What's going on is not they talk about in the news all the time, well, oil this and gasless and energy and blah blah blah blah blah. And they do mention, they do tap on a little bit about the supply chain and then how you're gonna feel it in the in the tank and reserve oil in different countries and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But trust me, it's it's not just that, right? And I'm not picking a side here either. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that oh war shouldn't happen or war should happen. I'm not saying I'm not taking a position in the conflict, I'm just saying this is what happens when the supply chain gets disrupted, right? So even though we know that the supply chain was kind of disrupted from before because the manufacturer was was trying to focus on the AI demand, right, and they weren't creating as much of one chip because they prioritize another chip. Now we had this to the pile, right? And it doesn't just affect like I said, it doesn't just affect gas, it ripples through the industry, like sim semiconductors get affected, semiconductor manufacturing get affected, and when manufacturers costs go up, right, everything eventually go downstream, right? All it's all the things and the consumer and businesses start to feel it, which is what we're talking about. So, how does it connect back to the DDR shortage, right? So when you look at something like a DDR RAM storage, it's not just the companies choosing to focus on AI, right? Limited resource, shifting priorities, and global pressure, all the countries shape what gets produced, what gets manufactured, they have to they have to triage in a sense, and I know about triage because I know it's a it's a medical term, but but sometimes you'll do it financially with your life. So, how does this impact businesses? Right? So, small businesses the takeaway from this is simple, right? Hardware availability is not guaranteed. Hardware availability is not guaranteed. Prices is not always stable, and upgrades that seem simple today might not be simple tomorrow, right? And might be more expensive, and might be more difficult. So you have to plan, and planning matters, and we're gonna talk we're gonna do on that, we're gonna dig into that more on part three of this of this series. So and before we go into the closing, well just recap, right? Because I tried because this is a heavy topic, you know, and I'm trying and I'm I'm I'm talking like I don't know how I explain this. I don't want to talk too much about politics because it's a tech focused podcast, and I don't want to talk about you know too much about philosophy, it's gonna come into play in economics, it's gonna come into play, but there's certain truths about life that one can't get away get away from, right? And and then a person like me who believe in absolute truths is that's what's gonna come out in my in my podcast and my worldview, right? So I'm not again I'm not picking a side when it comes to the conflict, but I'm trying to tell you that because again, when I listen to other other other people that talk about tech, you know, tech podcasts and that kind of stuff, or on on YouTube, they're focusing on how evil the companies are and things are not available because of greed and yada yada yada. And I'm not saying that that doesn't play a role in sometimes in some things, right? Sometimes they're just doing things because they want to make the most money out of things, like I and I can point out several several ways companies do that, but but we have a choice as consumers if you want to partake in it or not, right? And business do rely on on the technologies and your computer and and your servers and your firewalls, like this is not really if you're gonna be in business in this time frame, at least DNAs, you're gonna you need this stuff, right? So I don't like the position of like, oh, NVIDIA is evil because they're costing too much money, or NVIDIA is evil because there's like this circle between NVIDIA and meta, and they're just moving the money around. Like, why do you care what they're doing with the money? Like, I don't why do you care, right? Um, they're doing whatever they need to do to meet the market demands that they're making again. It might be a mistake. We did we we've been through this in the early 2000s with the dot-com, right? People were throwing money left, right, and center back then too. Like, I told you that this is a bubble. I meant I remember telling you this is a bubble. Not that AI isn't good, but what AI is gonna do and how we're gonna use it, and how it's what it's gonna look like at the end, nobody knows. We're just throwing money at every idea, the same way we did with internet sites, with websites. We were throwing money at anything with a dot com at the end of it. We didn't know what it was gonna look like, but we knew it's gonna be big, and that's the same thing with AI. People are complaining about AI in all different kinds of ways, whether it's it's from it's from you know Terminator, Starlink, or you know, is it gonna be sentient or it's taking away jobs, or all these now they're complaining about the server farms going everywhere, it's humming, and the people can't sleep. It's all different complaints, and I'm not saying that these complaints or these cons concerns are not valid, right? But it's coming. This it's AI is coming, you know what I mean. Like it's coming, it's kind of what Woker T Washington said about the civil rights, right? Civil rights at the time. He said it's it's like a train going on a track, you can't stop it, it's coming, and and there's a lot of questions, right? But people are not asking the questions, it's coming. So, you as a business owner, what you're gonna do, how you're gonna position yourself. Okay, there's a shortage now. We know why there's a shortage, there's a multiple things that's causing the shortage. We just talked about it in this podcast, right? So, how are we gonna approach it? You have to understand what's going on, don't be reactionary, and then plan around it, right? I just today had to replace my my modem in my house. I have a uh Doxis 3.1, no 3.0 modem, it's been in the house for a couple of years, and I am the kind of person that I'll let the wheels fall off or something before I replace it, right? So there's some kind of power surge over the night, and whatever, and there's things inside my server wrap to protect from power surges, but this thing has been here for like seven, eight years, so it's way beyond replacement, like it should have been replaced a while ago, but it's my house, whatever. I can go to the best way and pick up a new one, and that's what I did. But I wouldn't recommend that for someone that needs internet because that went down at four o'clock in the morning and they didn't replace it until I got up and got my breakfast and all that stuff, and I went out with the best way and picked it up. So I picked it up around like 12-11 o'clock, so it was out for like eight hours, it was down for about eight hours, right? All that eight, eight hours, you know, yeah, all that. So I can afford that. It's a house, okay. But if it was a business, there should have been a a modem sitting in the closet somewhere, so when the modem goes down, I could grab it and put it in and off to the races we go, right? It'll be down for about an hour, maybe 45 minutes. That's the difference, and this is a definite easy case because the modem is really old. So once it got to like four or five years or six years pushing it, I should have had a modem put away for it already. Again, so that's what I'm saying. It's like also, you know, other understanders. I'm gonna talk about this more in the third podcast, but I just want to give you like an idea of how we can position ourselves so we're not reacting to price changes and stuff like that, right? Again, they're manufacturing DDR5 for server forms for the GPUs that has to do the processing of the law LLMs, all like large language models, right? DDR4 still works, right? DDR4 is fine. Now they're a little bit hard to come by, but they're fine. And and again, when I say that they're focusing on DDR5s, they're still manufacturing DDR4s, right? But again, now because of the whole conflict, blah blah blah, he them is on a shortage and whatever, whatever. So let's see how it plays out, right? I'm not gonna jump to any conclusion, but you position yourself, you might have to hold on to the computer a little bit longer than you want it to, right? You might have to do that, and that's and and and that's just the name of the game. So talk about the hidden supply chain, talk about the the shortage of the game, talk about the global conflict angle, right? Talked about that, and are you connected to DDR5 talk about that? Talk about business impact. So so you get my closing thoughts in a way, and technology might feel technology might feel digital because if you're online and you're doing things online, but it it's built on physical or very physical, very global systems. So even though you're in front of your computer, you're looking at a website and everything is virtual, it's running on hardware that's physical, right? Remember that, right? Websites that you're looking at, it god knows where it is in the world, like not in the city that you live in, in the world, right? I have a uh a radio station, um, uh internet radio station, and the server that runs my radio station, like that that does the broadcasting, is not even in America, it's in England, right? So it's crazy, and I stream from here to that server, and then that server does the global managing the global stuff global stuff, so that's kind of how crazy that is. Um, so yes, it's it's it you feel like it's digital, but it's actually physical, and understanding the system gives you a advantage. This is kind of what I talk about when you're making decisions, and it's kind of my blind spot too, because I do kind of break things down a lot to this to the nucleus of things, and then it it works most of the time but sometimes it doesn't like in relationships and stuff like that I'm okay with that as a as a trade-off but but it does I do break things down to the nucleus and I say okay what is the what is the reason why this is happening biology okay so let's focus on the biological thing and then people be like what about my feelings I'm like oh well I know why you have the feelings so I'm just gonna focus on why you have the feelings I'm not gonna worry about the feeling itself that's irrelevant and that's kind of where the relationship thing kind of falls apart but focusing on why things are happening really understanding it helps you all in your business because then you you can get rid of all the noise and you can focus on what so that's what I'm trying to understand to understand the system itself and what gives it gives you an advantage when you're making decisions for your business okay so that's kind of how I'm taking it so yes we're gonna do this in a three part so we already did DDR four short DDR RAM shortage now we'll talk about kind of more expand upon it like it's not just this one thing that's causing it it's these other act aspects and glow it's it's a global thing and in the next one I'm gonna talk about the solutions and little ideas that business should take into consideration during this process so stay tuned for that so thanks for listening to Acton Tech right if you need any help building a reliable system or planning your IT infrastructure visit alexcustomtech.com now I'm saying this myself I've thought about it over the course of me doing this podcast and I'm like you know what let me start telling you guys to visit the website and if you need help let me know from there alright I'm still doing some tweaks but by all means go on there fill out the form there and I will get back to you if you need help. If you like what you're listening to you think I can help you in your business by all means go on there fill out the website fill out the form and I'll get back to you alright because I do love this and if I can help anybody out there that's listening to this I would love to do that. Okay?

SPEAKER_02 24:17

Like I always say stay productive hey there businesses ready to take your IT game to the next level get excited because Alex Custom Tech is coming your way we're your go-to for IT support bringing integrity and trust to every service from network upgrades to virtualization and even relocating your IT setup we've got you covered. Stay tuned as we put the finishing touches on our new site Alex Custom Tech helping your business thrive with top notch IT support right in your backyard.