Warning: Speculation. Summary: Current hardware prices may be due to military demand we can't see.

I know we've been thinking of big companies building massive datacenters. But another thought has occurred to me. Military drones with AI capabilities have been "on the rise" for the last two or three years, and every time one of them dives it takes a few gigabytes of RAM and at least a couple of NPU or GPU chips with it. Increasingly popular "autonomous" drones take even more because they do their own target tracking, visual navigation, and "mission completion" when the link to the operator is cut, or when GPS is jammed, etc.

Defense planners around the world have been watching the development of drone warfare and having a collective pants-crapping moment. In every country, they are realizing that they are not prepared to deal with this new threat at all. They are rushing and scrambling to have a million military drones of their own ready to use. They need a whole new generation of air defense radars and anti-aircraft guns and new classes of missiles and other hardware. They are facing a critical need to train and test and integrate the AI capabilities of this new hardware. They are feverishly speculating about what they will need to "maintain parity" with future developments, and trying to lock in long-term contracts with suppliers of crucial hardware such as RAM and NPU chips.

What kind of orders for fast RAM and AI processors must they be placing? What kind of demands or commitments to future sales must they be making? And what kind of budget is being tapped to pay for it all?

Whatever it is, we civilians are never going to see those orders. All that hardware is disappearing into military shops we never hear about and paid for out of budgets that are never disclosed.

I chased it for a little bit, and found a few vendors of military drone controllers. They seem to be divided into "Autopilots" and "Mission computers" roughly corresponding to "navigation and flight" and "everything else."

But the webpages and brochures really don't say very much about how much and what kind of hardware is getting blown to smithereens every time one of these drones is used. And of course they say nothing at all about how many such controllers are being sold to nations not currently at war but who are frantically developing drone and anti-drone capabilities for their own military.

The most specific information I got was about one "mission computer" that has at least a dozen "NPU matrix processors" each with 256M to 2G of RAM. I don't know from the brochure what kind of processing units those "NPU matrix processors" are. But it seems likely that they are the same GPU or NPU chips that AI developers are competing for. And a load of three to to twenty-four gigabytes of RAM per unit adds up. There are thousands of drones flying across the Russo-Ukrainian border and into oblivion each night. How many carry this class of hardware?

As far as I can tell the general idea behind these designs is that they tend to run a lot of "small" AI models simultaneously for particular subtasks. Many are just a quarter-gigabyte or less. These specialized small models can be run very fast and are fairly reliable, where a larger "whole mission" AI model would have much slower reflexes. So there's one that just does visual navigation, another that just does visual target tracking, another that tracks tactical threats such as other drones or ground-based installation, etc.

In an "autopilot" system I looked at, there's apparently one specialized subsystem whose "smarts" are wholly devoted to handling the challenges of skimming 7 meters above ocean waves in variable and gusty winds at 650 kph. But the website's description here gives zero details about what kind of compute hardware that entails.

So I am thinking that the current availability/price crisis facing pretty much everybody in the world who wants RAM right now, may be partially the result of a massive spike in demand caused by nations building military drones, largely unseen by civilians.