Everyone is affected. The hyperscalers and other large companies are paying huge money for memory too, they just pass the costs along. Apple for example dropped the 512GB config of the Mac Studio Ultra, now the largest you can order is 256GB. Next generation M5 Mac Studios will probably have a price bump and may also be limited to 256GB of memory.
The base price of the M5 Pro MBP did go up by $200, though. I suspect that if the rumored redesign for the M6 happens, there will be a fairly steep price increase at that point.
The whole AI thing is a financial house of cards. Lots of "commitments", but very little cash changing hands. AI profitability is still as much of a dream as a high-speed train in California. Seems almost certain that there will be a crash and, given the amount of money involved, it could be much worse than the dot com bust. For the short term, I lucked out by upgrading all my computers for the Windows 10 EOL. Just made it under the wire before prices started to climb. If the shortage does continue, we may actually see some focus on software efficiency instead of just more and bigger.
For image creation, the core of this forum, absolutelly not. For general old knowledge, expensive energy wise but worth it depending on the reader. Recent stuff, dangerous. Grammar checking, its only real usage that fits the design principles of the technology.
No, AI has been mostly terrible for me. I remember googling information about the difference between my drone and the previous model and it was telling me that my drone wasn't rumoured to be released for months. Obviously AI had just regurgitated the information from someone's blog post. I can't tell you how many times the information has been incorrect and others have found it simply making up data. However where it's good at is taking a transcript for a meeting and generating action items which has saved me hours at my work. People are starting to use it for recruiting so who knows what sort of biases that will introduce.
It depends on what the AI is being used for. All the hype is around artificial image creation and getting answers from the likes of Chat GPT. Neither of those are worth much, nor are likely to monetize well. I have a fairly small computer with an Intel B50 graphics card in it that I set up to do local AI. It will do most of the image generation that the big dogs do and Intel AI Playground is free for the loading, which really challenges the likelihood of huge data center monetization. Now the places where AI is useful. Nearly all modern cameras are using some form of AI to assist with autofocus and the relative improvement in AF over the last few years has been huge. If you do serious processing of photos, the Topaz suite (which uses AI extensively) is pretty much a must have, particularly if you shoot in difficult conditions at high ISO. The noise reduction and sharpening tools are unmatched. Even Adobe is using AI for noise reduction and object removal in Lightroom Classic. That is just in our little neck of the woods. You can question the value of the feature, but Tesla self-driving cars actually do work remarkably well. At the other end of the spectrum (and maybe the only place the data centers could see real revenue), AI driven warfare is currently being demonstrated and will only increase in capability in the future. That one is more than a little scary. In the end, I don't see any applications for AI that are going to pay for the enormous cap ex that is being thrown at data centers, not to mention the power bills. Virtually all the useful applications for AI to date are distributed functions that don't need data centers, except possibly once for training.
