Thanks to the AI investment bubble, the cost of ALL storage, all RAM modules (DIMMs, RDIMMs, etc.), the cost of NVME, the cost of SSDs, HDDs, etc, have all doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in some cases.
What I was buying for $200 just a couple of years ago is now $600.
And the GPUs I bought for $8000 are now $12,500.
The GPUs I bought for $2200 are now $5,000.
The mini data center setup I built in 2023 - 2024 -- with massive solid-state NAS (storage) servers holding hundreds of TB of data -- would not be possible today without spending a fortune.
The AI engines I built such as BrightAnswers.ai (a deep reserach engine) and BrightLearn.ai (creates free books on any topic) were only possible because of affordable storage and the ability to process huge collections of documents, books, articles, transcripts, etc.
Today it is almost impossible to build what I built back in 2024 (and is still running and working every day). At least, not without spending many millions of dollars and waiting months for components to arrive. The supply chains are wrecked!
I have always said it is critical to self-custody your own hardware. I built my entire system around that. Today, in 2026, it has become a harsh reality: If you don't own the hardware and if you can't run local AI, with local data and local compute, you will eventually be cut off.
More than ever, it is critical to own your own compute hardware and storage hardware. Know how to build it and maintain it. And know how to run local AI coding agents to troubleshoot hardware issues. Self-custody is the key. OWN IT. Control it. Have it set up in your home, or office, or bat cave or wherever. But never depend on blind faith in continued access to the cloud for machine intelligence. A day is coming when you will be cut off.