Organisations planning to upgrade their IT infrastructure need to move quickly to secure hardware amidst warnings that the AI boom is set to cause major supply chain issues.
Global demand for memory chips is now outpacing supplies as manufacturers prioritise delivery of high-capacity solutions for AI infrastructure projects.
“Manufacturing capacity is being focused on serving memory-hungry data centres at the expense of consumer and enterprise electronics,” commented Andrew Roberts, managing director of technology solutions specialist Avoira.
“Put bluntly, they’re moving where the money is. The margins for high-bandwidth and high-capacity memory modules are more substantial than those which serve mainstream applications.”
“As a result chips are becoming scarce, with major hardware vendors already warning of likely shipping delays. That scarcity is fuelling significant increases in the cost of chips which ultimately will ripple along the supply chain and result in price rises for hardware.”
Warning that shortages are likely to echo those seen during the pandemic, he added that supply chain issues have already seen one major vendor of desktops, servers and network switches increase prices by up to 30 percent.
One data cloud specialist has also cut the time for which it will honour quotes to just two weeks.
“The combination of hardware shortages and narrower quote windows, will undoubtedly impact technology procurement.”
“IT and finance professionals are going to need to act swiftly to insulate their organisations from a shockwave which is set to reverberate well into next year,” warns Roberts.
