Scenario: a small AI team budgets for eight new GPU servers in March.
By October they still hold a quote, not a box.
The cause is specific.
Michael Dell told the Wall Street Journal the memory shortage gets worse in 2027, and Dell is sitting on roughly $95 billion of AI server orders it has not delivered yet, the largest backlog in its history.
Memory is what holds those shipments.
AI accelerators need HBM, the servers around them need conventional DRAM, and both are being pulled into data center buildouts at the same time.
New memory fabs take about four years, so Dell does not expect meaningful new supply until 2029 or 2030.
Micron's CEO sees 2027 and 2028 as tighter than this year.
SK hynix expects the shortage to run through 2030.
The invoice is already here.
Memory prices are up nearly 500% in the last twelve months.
Dell raised PC prices 15 to 20% late last year and is raising monitor prices this month.
For a team that needs one working cluster to test a model, waiting for that queue is a four year commitment.
The compute that exists right now has no such queue.
RTX 3090s at $0.15/hr and storage at $2.49/TB per month, with Buy Now Pay Later, zero upfront and payment after one month.
Pricing and availability: https://ai.bhkcloud.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=bhk_social_2026w43&utm_content=morning What is the longest you have waited on hardware after paying a deposit?
Originally posted on linkedin_personal