Rocketing demand from AI companies in data centres means that enterprise hard drives are on a 24-month backorder. CC-licensed photo by Andrea Schiavon on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage • Tom’s Hardware
Hassam Nasir:
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The race to achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence) has pushed constituents to invest in and build data centers at a pace far outstripping our ability to make them. Manufacturers are struggling to keep up with AI demand, and the ongoing DRAM shortage is proof of this, with memory kits costing more than double what they did just a few months ago. Now, DigiTimes is reporting that storage is taking a hit, too, with delivery times for enterprise-grade HDDs delayed by two years.
That means if a firm wants to buy large-capacity hard drives, the backbone of nearline storage, it has to wait 24 months due to long lead times. As the news cycle suggests, AI money doesn’t wait for anyone, so hyperscalers are now switching to QLC NAND-based SSDs to avoid these backorders. Picking QLC over TLC allows them to maintain costs while achieving sufficient endurance for cold storage.
However, hoarding QLC NAND creates its own shortage, since every cloud provider in North America and China is now lining up to buy it. This could lead to SSD prices rising worldwide, as most value-oriented models use QLC to save costs. In fact, DigiTimes claims that production capacity for QLC is completely booked through 2026 at some NAND manufacturers.
Therefore, given the current situation, QLC NAND is expected to overtake TLC in popularity by early 2027, marking a significant shift in the storage landscape. While enterprise-grade QLC SSDs would entirely power this pivot, Sandisk has already raised NAND prices by 50%, according to another DigiTimes report, after initially warning of a 10% increase two months ago.
This unprecedented shortage across memory and storage was largely unforeseen. Still, given the AI ambitions of the world’s wealthiest, the overnight whiplash is perhaps the only surprising aspect of these price hikes.
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All of which is probably going to mean more expensive hard drives for the average consumer.
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Is thin really in? Not for lots of smartphone shoppers • The Washington Post
Chris Velazco:
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Philip Maddalena was drawn to the iPhone 17 Air because of its sleek look. He watched Apple’s keynote, read the reviews and bought it the day it went on sale.
The lawyer from Connecticut was smitten with its look, but the love didn’t last. The Air’s single camera wasn’t a good fit for capturing his two young kids, he said, and the speakerphone never got quite loud enough. Mostly though, he says he struggled with its battery — he needed it to last longer, to stay in touch with judges and clients. A few weeks later, Maddalena decided to exchange it for an iPhone 17 Pro.
“I think the idea of trying something a little different with an iPhone was appealing,” the 37-year-old said. “But, you know, I need my phone to perform for me.”
Maddalena isn’t the only one unimpressed with Apple’s thinner phone. Despite a wave of prelaunch hype and interest, lower-than-expected sales of super-slim smartphones from Apple and its rival Samsung have forced the companies to rethink the mix of gadgets they plan to sell next year.
Apple is said to have dialed down production of the iPhone 17 Air after it debuted to mixed reviews two months ago, and has now delayed plans to introduce an improved follow-up model next year, according to The Information. Samsung, which beat Apple to market with its slim Galaxy S25 Edge phone in May, finds itself in a similar position. Soft demand prompted the company to scuttle plans for a sequel originally meant to debut next January, local media reports say.
…the iPhone Air isn’t dead, just delayed, according to The Information, which reported on Monday that Apple is committed to building a new version of the Air — said to include a larger battery and a second rear camera — it hopes to release in early 2027.
Meanwhile, consumers overseas have been more receptive to these gadgets, especially in China — a crucial market for smartphone makers.
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China is really the test. If the Air does well there, all will be forgiven. But the bright orange Pro is probably going to be the better way to show you’ve spent big, which is a key message for Chinese buyers.
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Judge rules Flock surveillance images are public records that can be requested by anyone • 404 Media
Jason Koebler:
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A judge in Washington has ruled that police images taken by Flock’s AI license plate-scanning cameras are public records that can be requested as part of normal public records requests. The decision highlights the sheer volume of the technology-fueled surveillance state in the United States, and shows that at least in some cases, police cannot withhold the data collected by its surveillance systems.
In a judgment last week, Judge Elizabeth Neidzwski ruled that “the Flock images generated by the Flock cameras located in Stanwood and Sedro-Wooley [Washington] are public records under the Washington State Public Records Act,” that they are “not exempt from disclosure,” and that “an agency does not have to possess a record for that record to be subject to the Public Records Act.”
She further found that “Flock camera images are created and used to further a governmental purpose” and that the images on them are public records because they were paid for by taxpayers. Despite this, the records that were requested as part of the case will not be released because the city automatically deleted them after 30 days.
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So everyone gets to be a crime monitor?
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The Chinese EV market is imploding • The Atlantic
Michael Schuman:
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The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country’s seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing’s meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.
Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China’s EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China’s car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it “just hasn’t erupted yet.”
To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry’s downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself.
What happens in China’s EV sector promises to influence the entire global automobile market. China’s emergence as the world’s largest manufacturer of EVs highlights the serious challenge the country poses to even the most advanced industries in the U.S., Europe, and other rich economies. Given the vital role the car industry plays in economies around the world, and the jobs, supply chains, and technologies involved, the stakes are high.
But the wobbles in China’s EV sector demonstrate the downside of China’s state-led economic model. China’s government threw ample resources at the EV industry in the hopes of leapfrogging foreign rivals in the transition to battery-powered vehicles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the government provided more than $230 billion of financial assistance to the EV sector from 2009 to 2023. The strategy worked: China’s EV makers would likely never have grown as quickly as they have without this substantial state support. By comparison, the recent Republican-sponsored tax bill eliminated nearly all federal subsidies for EVs in the U.S.
The problem is that China’s program encouraged too much investment in the sector. Michael Dunne, the CEO of Dunne Insights, a California-based consulting firm focused on the EV industry, counts 46 domestic and international automakers producing EVs in China, far too many for even the world’s second-largest economy to sustain.
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The long-ago automobile market of the 19th/20th century had dozens of brands, and they died off; the PC business likewise in its early days. The Chinese smartphone market had scores of brands for a while, but what happened there isn’t clear. EVs could well just be the same pattern that markets go through. (Gift link.)
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Google vows to stop scam E-Z Pass and USPS texts plaguing Americans • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Google is suing to stop phishing attacks that target millions globally, including campaigns that fake toll notices, offer bogus e-commerce deals, and impersonate financial institutions.
In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people into “disclosing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or banking information, often by impersonating well-known brands, government agencies, or even people the victim knows.”
These branded “Lighthouse” kits offer two versions of software, depending on whether bad actors want to launch SMS and e-commerce scams. “Members may subscribe to weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent licenses,” Google alleged. Kits include “hundreds of templates for fake websites, domain set-up tools for those fake websites, and other features designed to dupe victims into believing they are entering sensitive information on a legitimate website.”
Google’s filing said the scams often begin with a text claiming that a toll fee is overdue or a small fee must be paid to redeliver a package. Other times they appear as ads—sometimes even Google ads, until Google detected and suspended accounts—luring victims by mimicking popular brands. Anyone who clicks will be redirected to a website to input sensitive information; the sites often claim to accept payments from trusted wallets like Google Pay.
From there, a vast criminal network operating through YouTube and Telegram channels works to gather the information, with each scammer playing a specific role in a wide-reaching scheme that Google noted has tricked more than a million people in 121 countries so far. Draining wallets and sometimes even bank accounts, the Lighthouse schemes have resulted in losses of “over a billion dollars,” a Google press release said, citing a Department of Homeland Security estimate.
…Cracking down on the broad enterprise will be tough, Google anticipates, with its complaint only referencing online aliases and naming a range of John Doe plaintiffs. But identities of all actors in the enterprise—including software developers, data brokers, spammers, thieves, and administrators—must be uncovered to stop the criminal gang from continuing to provide so-called phishing-as-a-service.
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I think that “vow” is not going to be fulfilled in the near future, given the difficulty of discovering the names of those responsible, who are anyway in China, which isn’t in the habit of giving up its nationals for prosecutions abroad.
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Meet gen X: middle-aged, enraged and radicalised by internet bile • The Guardian
Gaby Hinsliff:
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A few days ago I was in Aldi, making the usual small talk at the checkout. When the cashier said she was exhausted from working extra shifts to make some money for Christmas, the man behind me chipped in that it would be worse once “she takes all our money” (in case Rachel Reeves was wondering, her budget pitch-rolling is definitely cutting through). Routine enough, if he hadn’t gone on to add that she and the rest of the government needed taking out, and that there were plenty of ex-military men around who should know what to do, before continuing in more graphic fashion until the queue fell quiet and feet began shuffling. But the strangest thing was that he said it all quite calmly, as if political assassination was just another acceptable subject for casual conversation with strangers, such as football or how long the roadworks have gone on. It wasn’t until later that it clicked: this was a Facebook conversation come to life. He was saying out loud, and in public, the kind of thing people say casually all the time on the internet, apparently without recognising that in the real world it’s still shocking – at least for now.
I thought about him when the health secretary, Wes Streeting, voiced alarm this week that it was becoming “socially acceptable to be racist” again, with ethnic minority NHS staff fighting a demoralising tide of things people now apparently feel emboldened to say to them. What Streeting was describing – not just unabashed racism, but a sense of inhibitions disappearing out of the window more generally – goes well beyond hospital waiting rooms. You can feel it at bus stops, where polite inquiries about why the 44 doesn’t stop here any more end up wheeling off at sudden wild tangents about chemtrails or the government spying on you; or in casual school-gate chats, where otherwise perfectly ordinary-seeming parents turn out to have some very odd ideas about vaccines.
A friend calls it “sauna politics”, after the surreally conspiracy-laden conversations she overhears in her local leisure centre sauna. But whatever you want to call it, it’s as if people are suddenly voicing their interior monologues – things that until recently they’d have been embarrassed to say in public, or sometimes even to admit to themselves that they thought – out loud. After all, they can say this stuff online and nobody bats an eyelid.
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Weird, and scary. Rather than bringing the reserve we have offline to the online world, people are doing the reverse.
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The impact of visual generative AI on advertising effectiveness • SSRN
Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos, and Anindya Ghose:
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The advertising industry stands at a pivotal moment as visual generative AI (genAI) can transform creative content production. Despite growing enthusiasm, empirical evidence on when and how to integrate visual genAI into advertising remains limited. This study investigates three approaches: (1) human expert-created ads, (2) genAI-modified ads, in which genAI enhances expert designs, and (3) genAI-created ads, generated entirely by visual genAI.
Using a mixed-methods design that combines latent diffusion models, a laboratory experiment, and a field study, we evaluate the relative effectiveness of these approaches. Across studies, we find that genAI-created ads consistently outperform both human-and genAI-modified ads, increasing click-through rates by up to 19% in field settings. In contrast, genAI-modified ads show no significant improvement over human-created benchmarks.
These results reveal an asymmetry: visual genAI delivers greater value when used for holistic ad creation rather than for modification, where creative constraints may limit its effectiveness. Effectiveness increases even more when genAI also designs product packaging, representing the lowest degree of output constraints.
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This was done with real-world testing, putting the ads through Google and measuring clickthroughs. Is AI going to replace the advertising executive?
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China launches bidirectional electric vehicle charging stations • Rest of World
Kinling Lo:
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The Chinese government is rolling out special two-way charging stations that allow parked EVs to send power back to the grid during peak demand periods. They use vehicle-to-grid technology, or V2G. At least 30 V2G stations have been set up across nine cities including Beijing and Shanghai. The plan is to have 5,000 such stations among China’s 28 million total charging points by 2027.
Chinese officials predict widespread V2G adoption by 2030 would unlock 1 billion kilowatts of capacity from an expected fleet of 100 million EVs. The move could help diversify energy sources beyond coal in a country that’s home to 40 million electric cars.
China aims to adopt the technology nationwide, despite other countries having struggled to use it. More than 150 V2G projects across 27 countries including Japan, South Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. have remained stuck in tiny trials for over a decade. While the technology seems beneficial on paper, its trials have failed to overcome the problems of high costs, consumer resistance, and market barriers such as inconsistent electricity pricing systems.
“China is obviously the global leader on EVs, but in V2G, deployment is in early days,” Alan Jenn, an electric-car expert at the Institute of Transportation Studies at University of California, Davis, told Rest of World. “V2G in China could certainly be propelled farther than other countries, the government has been much more willing to put large-scale investments on a very different magnitude than most other countries in the world.”
…Research from the US Department of Energy shows that cars sit unused 95% of the time, meaning EV batteries could store cheap nighttime electricity and feed it back when prices spike. Owners could earn money while their vehicles sit parked.
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There are lots of issues – costs of the charging stations, but also vehicle owners’ concern that the battery won’t benefit from being charged and discharged all the time. Plus what if you came to your car and the battery was flat because it was helping out during a time of demand?
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New bridge in south-west China collapses into mountainside • The Guardian
Amy Hawkins:
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A newly opened bridge in south-west China collapsed on Tuesday, sending slabs of concrete and plumes of dust into the mountainside and water below. No casualties were reported.
Videos of the collapse of part of Hongqi Bridge, in the mountainous Sichuan province, were shared widely on Chinese social media. Authorities had closed the 758-metre-long bridge on Monday after cracks appeared on nearby roads. A landslide on Tuesday caused part of the bridge to collapse completely.
The bridge was part of a national highway linking Sichuan and Tibet, which runs through a seismically active part of China. The highway runs through the area that was devastated by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people.
Construction of the Hongqi Bridge was finished earlier this year, according to a social media post by the contractors Sichuan Road and Bridge Group.
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The collapse is blamed on the landslip. But it does show that all that gigantic scale construction in China isn’t perfect.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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