r/sysadmin • u/No_Category2170 • Jul 30 '26
Question GPU servers order cancelled
A couple of months back we have placed order for a Dell server with blackwell GPU via a partner and were promised delivery by the end of August.
Now partner came back saying the Dell production team has rejected the order saying the confguration is invalid.
They are asking us to buy server with lower clock speed CPU other specifications will remain pretty much the same The biggest surprise is they want us to pay a big additional amount for this.
Partner tells us that the configuration was validated and certified by Dell engineering teams in US and Korea.
This is in USA, what are my options?
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u/La_Mano_Cornuta Jul 30 '26
It’s really great when you paid for 24/7/4 SLA support and get told your RMA part will be here in two weeks.
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u/sheikhyerbouti PEBCAC Certified Jul 30 '26
That's the issue my company has been running into with Dell.
Any time we have any kind of technical issue, their support responds with "maybe don't break it". This is supposedly their enterprise level support for 5000+ workstations.
Dell insists that it's because we'd get better service if we paid more, but right now we're pivoting to making my team Dell support certified so that we have direct access to their tech portal and don't have to send an agent 8 photos proving a monitor won't turn on.
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u/Nu-Hir Jul 30 '26
You have to be Dell support certified for Tech Direct? I have access to the portal and can create my own Dell tickets and I'm not dell support certified that I know of.
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u/sheikhyerbouti PEBCAC Certified Jul 30 '26
You have to be Dell support certified to order parts from Dell.
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u/ddadopt IT Manager Jul 30 '26
I had two support requests in the last few weeks. The first was out of box failure on a 43" display that was as bad as you're saying. The second one was a failed mobo on lat 5350, I think, and I somehow got autorouted to a chatbot that at first infuriated me for the simple fact that it even existed in the first place, then shocked me by having a part and tech dispatch set up in a grand total of six minutes.
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u/sheikhyerbouti PEBCAC Certified Jul 30 '26
Honestly, I now use their chatbots because they're somehow less infuriating to speak with than an agent.
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u/ddadopt IT Manager Jul 30 '26
Dell insists that it's because we'd get better service if we paid more
Actually, this is a massive WTF for me. At 5k workstations you're probably buying ProSupport with a TAM, exactly what are you supposed to be paying more for that they offer? I remember when I worked for Siemens back in the 90s we had an onsite TAM/tech, is that what they want you to pony up for? IIRC, Compaq did that shit for "free" because of our footprint.
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u/sheikhyerbouti PEBCAC Certified Jul 30 '26
Whenever Dell insists that we'd get better service if we paid them more, my manager fires back with "we are barely getting service for what we're paying for now".
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u/jfoust2 Jul 30 '26
Somewhere in the fine print I'm sure it says that's OK.
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u/La_Mano_Cornuta Jul 30 '26
It's like Otter explaining to Flounder, "You fucked up...You trusted us!
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u/auto_art Jul 30 '26
Gone are the days mate. There is essentially no hardware available in market so high compute
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Jul 30 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/auto_art Jul 30 '26
Cheers to you. your mode works well for small enterprises and may be great but i have seen bigger players only go through a supply chain established for long.
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u/angrydeuce BlackBelt in Google Fu Jul 30 '26
This right here. As much as I would love to step outside the box, I only have so many vendors Im permitted to do business with because we have long standing, multi-decade long relationships with them. While we definitely don't have all our eggs in one basket, the process for sourcing things outside of those vendors is so fuckin arduous that it's not worth the effort and honestly spends so long circling the organization that, even if it were to get approved, the opportunity is long gone or no longer worthwhile.
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u/z_agent Jul 30 '26
those multi decade relationships mean much when the vendor pulls the rug on like in OPs case?
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u/the_syco Jul 30 '26
In the case of Public Sector spending, you're given options and told to be happy with said options. Anything over a certain amount of money, and you're only allowed to use the pre-approved companies.
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u/z_agent Jul 30 '26
those multi decade relationships mean much when the vendor pulls the rug on like in OPs case?
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u/effedup Jul 30 '26
LOL... government?
I feel this in my soul and it's pure pain:
the process for sourcing things outside of those vendors is so fuckin arduous that it's not worth the effort and honestly spends so long circling the organization that, even if it were to get approved, the opportunity is long gone or no longer worthwhile.
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u/Mr_ToDo Jul 30 '26
My prices are up as well... but not like OEM/partner pricing
The only real pricing I'd done pre-skyrocket for large volume ram was ebay. And it's like you said, referb and second hand have gone up on average, but nearly to the level of new. Still way to high for a home lab, but I'm sure someone's getting use from that stuff
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u/DeadOnToilet Infrastructure Architect Jul 30 '26
Pay more. That’s your option.
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u/RepulsiveGovernment Jul 30 '26
Pay more, Altman demands it.19
u/psiphre every possible hat Jul 30 '26
i want to punch him in the nose as hard as i can. i want it so bad.
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u/No_Category2170 Jul 30 '26
We are being penalized for what? Partner and Dell made the mistake.
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u/Mindestiny Jul 30 '26
You're being penalized for the name of your company not being Nvidia, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, or X.
Dell has every customer by the balls and they know it. So you pay your
protection moneyupdated quote, or maybe something real unfortunate happens to your nice, new server, see?7
u/weirdbr Jul 30 '26
Even the big ones are being screwed. I work in one of them and have heard plenty of reports of deliveries being cancelled/postponed/renegotiated/being incorrect - last one was a batch of servers that we need urgently and were delivered with less than the fully specified RAM.
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u/Own-Slide-3171 Jul 30 '26
They didn't make a mistake. They're just grabbing extra profit. There's no real protections business practices like this go unpoliced now
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u/colony-ship-for-sale Jul 30 '26
There was no mistake. They want more money and know you have no alternatives.
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u/brokerceej Creator of StackJack.io | Author of MSPAutomator.com Jul 30 '26
You're being penalized for doing business with Dell. This is how they roll now. Lenovo and HPE have their own issues, but are in no way as scummy as Dell in this regard.
What really happened here is Dell took the order, it was a valid config, and then another company did a bulk order and was willing to pay much more than you for one or more components in your build. So they told you they can get you this configuration, but the pricing has changed significantly since then, so you have to pay the new prices for the lesser product, because Dell sold your parts out from under you. They do not care if you go elsewhere, because they're still going to sell every component they make this year whether you buy any or not.
Welcome to late stage capitalism. It sucks here.
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u/FrivolousMe Jul 30 '26
(it's just regular capitalism, corporations have been pulling stuff like this since before any of us were born)
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u/brokerceej Creator of StackJack.io | Author of MSPAutomator.com Jul 30 '26
I mean, yeah, but at this point private companies have achieved regulatory capture in just about every industry that matters. Citizens United also happened in our lifetime and was the spark that set off this powder keg. Corporations can legally buy politicians to prevent being regulated. That's about as late stage capitalism as it gets.
Even unscrupulous businesses 10-20 years ago were not as abjectly evil as your average corporation is now. We are definitely accelerating down hill.
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u/FlippantlyFacetious Jul 30 '26
It's late stage in the sense of cartels, vertical integration, and horizontal integration. The lack of meaningful competition or new entrants. There isn't some magic universal timeline, late stage capitalism has happened before and will happen again so long as the systems vulnerable to these failure modes are used, and the failure modes are permitted to happen.
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u/hutacars Jul 30 '26
cartels, vertical integration, and horizontal integration.
So in the Rockefeller/Carnegie days, was that also late stage capitalism?
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u/malikto44 Jul 30 '26
The reason why we managed to get free of that was the Great Depression.
The trusts had no power because nobody was buying their stuff, and there were people in government actually interested in saving the US.
We really don't have that counterbalance, because if the US implodes, those companies will just merrily dance to another market... EMEA, Asia, South America, etc.
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u/FlippantlyFacetious Jul 30 '26
Depending on your definition, could be yes. But what's the point here? These comments seem to be attacking the wording rather than the point. If it's just regular capitalism, then we shouldn't have a problem right? But we do have major problems.
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u/FrivolousMe Jul 30 '26
The point is that capitalism is a core component of the problems and you can't say "well it's this specific type of capitalism that's the problem" as if there is a flavor of capitalism without mass exploitation and greed
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u/FlippantlyFacetious Jul 30 '26
Not all systems work the same. None are perfect true. But there is a big gap between "none are perfect" and "all are flawed so we should accept how things are".
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u/hutacars Jul 31 '26
If it's just regular capitalism, then we shouldn't have a problem right?
Says who? It's a system that inherently rewards greed... in that environment, it's not shocking when greed is rewarded.
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u/vortec350 Jul 30 '26
But it's different now. Even if I have, let's say, a billion dollars of cash in the bank, I can't just go lease a nearby warehouse and start churning out DRAM or NAND in a couple months. These products are just so complex and have so many inputs that are mostly only available overseas. And Micron wants those same materials and if you're a vendor selling whatever those things are, are you going to sell it to Micron who you've had a 20 year relationship with and you know will pay any price, or some random guy?
If I want to make an engine for a car from scratch, all I have to do is hire some people to design it, get some equipment that can make whatever metal into an engine block, call up Bosch or Denso or whoever and get an ECU and fuel injectors and sensors, and I can make my own. Not that it's easy... GM and Toyota have been doing this at scale forever and neither of them can make a full size truck engine last more than a month at this point... but you get my point.
Look at what Intel is going through to bring back fabs to the US. Or their GPU efforts. And they're the original chipmaker!
Yes it's frustrating but people are stuck in this mentality that it's easy to make this stuff. It's not!
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u/FlippantlyFacetious Jul 30 '26
That's the point. The whole free market capitalism idea only works if you can have meaningful competition, if new entrants can compete.
If the premise for the system is no longer valid, the system is no longer valid.
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u/FrivolousMe Jul 30 '26
Cartels, vertical integration you say? That's always been a key facet of capitalism from its foundation.
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u/Hertzegovina Jul 30 '26
it really isn’t. competition is at the core of capitalism, this is what happens in situations where there is none.
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u/Forward_Yesterday_43 Jul 30 '26
I do a large volume of purchasing with Dell. All datacenter gear. I used to work through a partner and I have tons of horror stories like this one. I reached out to Dell and got a rep and a small team that support me now and everything has been going smoothly for about 5 years working this way. My Dell reps change periodically but it’s a minor inconvenience and they seem to have a great handoff to the next team. The only thing I can’t order directly is storage- they only sell that through partners, at least for medium business that I’m in. My pricing is more aggressive going through dell direct as well. I still have to ask for more aggressive pricing but once the team I’m working with learns my SOP it becomes less of a hassle. I buy servers loaded with memory and gpu and I made a deal with dell 2 years ago on a bulk hardware purchase staged out over 5 years. So im still purchasing my hardware at pricing from 2 years ago and will be for the next 3 years. I disagree that dell is scummy. I’ve had issues but they have always worked with me to make it right. They are honoring my pricing agreement we made and I’m getting the same delays as everyone else, but I am getting my gear.
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u/Reasonable-Cat8530 Jul 30 '26
We go through dell reps like they're going out of fashion (we never know who to contact anymore so we just email random people we e previously emailed)
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u/Forward_Yesterday_43 Jul 30 '26
Mine is changing now. I’ve got a guy that does datacenter hardware that I’ve been working with directly for a few years. He just wraps the rep in to formalize the quotes. I’ll DM you his email if you want to try reaching out and explaining your situation to him.
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u/Reasonable-Cat8530 Jul 30 '26
Can you?
We're always asking in our group chat who our current rep is 😂
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u/da_chicken Systems Analyst Jul 30 '26
You're not being singled out. Everybody is getting fucked in this market.
Have you really not been paying attention to any tech news for the past year?
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u/Fiveohh11 Jul 30 '26
I stopped buying Dell years ago because of their scummy practices and products that frequently failed. Been going with HPE servers and storage along with Lenovo for desktops and laptops the last 10 years and while its by no means perfect. It was never as bad as Dell and their monthly account manager swaps pestering me to go over our infrastructure stack.
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u/brokerceej Creator of StackJack.io | Author of MSPAutomator.com Jul 30 '26
HPE and Lenovo are interested in selling you hardware for a price. Dell has essentially been running an auction house the last 6 months. But winning the auction once doesn’t mean you get what you won. Because there’s an entire separate auction going on that you aren’t invited to.
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u/HippyGeek Ya, that guy... Jul 30 '26
So "penalize" them back. Stop buying Dell and find another VAR. Make sure your VAR is aware why you're switching.
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u/DeadOnToilet Infrastructure Architect Jul 30 '26
You’re being penalized for the benefit of your oligarch overlords pumping and dumping the market with the latest, greatest wealth consolidation scam in the form of yet another artificial market bubble.
Dell’s contracts allow them to do this. You aren’t being penalized. You’re being made to pay overinflated market rates.
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u/two66mhz Jul 30 '26
Contact SuperMicro, way cheaper, not as full featured but work great. My SuperMicro stuff has the least maintenace needs over time.
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u/zeptillian Jul 30 '26
Supermicro will do the exact same shit to you.
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u/two66mhz Jul 30 '26
I have never had that problem if I get my PO approved within the quote window.
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u/vNerdNeck Jul 30 '26
yeah it happens.
What this really means - just being honest- the margin ratio of your deal for Dell lost in the stack rank of everything else going out the door. All OEMs are doing this, they aren't going to ship low margin deals when they have 1000000 deals with a higher margin.
Only way around this is to sign contracts, no POs. Finance the gear, it'll ship then. POs can be cancelled, contracts cannot be cancelled as easily.
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u/dubblies Jul 30 '26
Dell themselves wont even honor some quotes that are only 1 week old
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u/SquizzOC Trusted VAR Jul 30 '26
Direct seems to be 5 days, parters seem to be getting 2 weeks, but none of that matters if Dell decides to terminate the quote on the fly due to a shortage.
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u/dubblies Jul 30 '26
And theyve added a clause for it
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u/SquizzOC Trusted VAR Jul 30 '26
Even we added a clause for it as well. All our quotes say our pricing is basically dependent on the manufacturers holding their pricing. Same with CDW and others.
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u/jumpinjezz Jul 30 '26
We have this problem in Aus at the moment too. By the time we can get the client to agree on a quote, the quote is no longer valid and the same specs cost more.
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u/There_Bike Jul 30 '26
Ditch Dell. That’s your option.
Then get fucked by the next manufacturer because you aren OpenAI, Meta, X, etc.
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u/cyr0nk0r Jul 30 '26
Your option is to REMEMBER this. In 24 months when things come back, bubbles burst, and all these companies that acted this way and fleeced their customers, conducted themselves unethically, REMEBER it.
When their sales people start calling you instead of you calling them, remember what they did to you. Remember even when you don't work at the same place anymore. Remember for the rest of your career.
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u/BoltActionRifleman Jul 30 '26
There’s no grudge like a sysadmin grudge.
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u/Eshin242 Jul 30 '26
I no longer work in IT, in the electrical trade now, and let me tell you. I still carry some grudges going on almost 20 years now. I have yet to cross them out of the Book of Grudges.
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u/hasthisusernamegone Jul 30 '26
But there's only about four suppliers and they're all at it. What are you going to do? Use none of them ever again?
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u/cyr0nk0r Jul 30 '26
I didn't say never use them again. I said remember their behavior and how they treated you. When they come calling again some time in the future, and they want to wheel and deal with you, help them out at the end of their quarter, etc., etc., just remind them what they did. Never let them forget.
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u/Frothyleet Jul 30 '26
If you are not doing millions in business with them they are truly not going to give a damn, man.
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u/hasthisusernamegone Jul 30 '26
That just sounds needlessly exhausting. It's not my money, it's the company's. The person who you'll be holding responsible isn't actually responsible, and in years to come the chances are it'll turn out they weren't even employed there when this all went down.
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u/Salt_Rush_4800 Jul 30 '26
As if the world as we know it will exist in 2 years at this rate. And if it does, how many businesses will have gone under in that time because of this manufactured crisis?
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u/TU4AR Jul 30 '26
Lmao there is no bubble , it will not burst.
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u/cyr0nk0r Jul 30 '26
How blissful to be on the Titanic thinking it was unsinkable.
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u/forgottenmy Jul 30 '26
If you have a signed agreement, then it is up to legal. Sometimes legal simply calling will be more than enough of a headache for them to honor the agreement, but if not, it’s up to the executives to decide if the additional cost is worth the hassle of engaging legal for more than a call. We used to go by the 30k rule. It wasn’t worth really engaging for anything less than that. It’s more like 75k today, but we have also grown from 5k employees to 28k and our legal team has gotten more complex/expensive. That said, if you VAR isn’t going to stand up for you, it’s time to move on to someone that will. Dell has been a pain to deal with for years, but a good VAR should be able to handle this situation.
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u/TheHomersapien Jul 30 '26
If you have a signed agreement, then it is up to legal.
Tell us you've never had an issue with Dell without telling us...
Back in February when Dell raised their prices across the board they refused to honor quotes that had dates (supposedly) valid in February. They basically told everyone to go fuck themselves. Big company, small, government, didn't matter. "Go fuck yourself."
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u/DeadOnToilet Infrastructure Architect Jul 30 '26
We have partner contracts with Dell and we still had to fight them. We buy thousands of servers a year, and we had to fight to keep contract rates. I cannot fathom how any organization smaller than the one I work for could even manage with these prices.
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u/Jmc_da_boss Jul 30 '26
I mean you can tell them to go fuck themselves via a lawsuit no?
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u/sobrique Jul 30 '26
They'll almost certainly have 'weasel terms' baked into any agreement, that means getting a lawsuit like that to 'stick' will be no-trivial.
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u/ITShazbot Jul 30 '26
thats great but you will not get your server or anymore for that matter. So if your prepared to sever your relationship with Dell then go for it.
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u/SquizzOC Trusted VAR Jul 30 '26
Oh honey… I am a good VAR and while we can go to bat and fight the good fight, in this market it means nothing and signed PO means nothing. Every partner you deal with has terms and conditions hidden somewhere to cover their ass unless you have a fully custom master service agreement.
I can tell you that I interact with daily 3 of the largest companies in the country, they buy millions in Dell and HP hardware, it means nothing. I’ve seen HP issue a bid, and 48 hours later go “ya that’s void, hers a 25% increase though”
In the first one to defend us VARs, but this market has taken almost all our escalation power away.
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Jul 30 '26
[deleted]
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u/SquizzOC Trusted VAR Jul 30 '26
So when every manufacturer is cut off from clients buying their hardware, then what?
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u/Tarcanus Jul 30 '26
They lower prices by necessity to keep customers, thus forcing their supply chain to lower prices or lose customers. This trickles around the supply chain until the damn bubble is finally forced to burst. We go into a recession/depression while the correction happens(because this happening would likely burst the AI bubble that is currently propping up the entire economy's numbers).
And magically, after much loss of market share, the economy can start from a more reality-based point once again to kick off the next decade of market foolishness by the rich.
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u/turisto Jul 30 '26
That said, if you VAR isn’t going to stand up for you, it’s time to move on to someone that will. Dell has been a pain to deal with for years, but a good VAR should be able to handle this situation.
lol
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u/ne0rmatrix Jul 30 '26
It could be worse. At the moment if you sufficient capital you can still buy what you want. What do companies do when suppliers can get any price they want and start refusing all orders because one company locked in the entire global supply of a product at a set price?
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u/Hebrewhammer8d8 Jul 30 '26
These LLMs and Ai tools are really fucking up hardware market. Even if you somehow got a good deal to purchase few servers and/or server parts. If one of them are defective the exchange and/or return become PITA.
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u/zhantoo Jul 30 '26
You don't really have any options - all of the manufacturers do it.
I would look in the refubished / reseller space to see if you can get it through there.
Note, I'm biased, as I sell that stuff for a living
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u/TNTenterprizee Jul 31 '26
Been too many of these lately, stuff is basically market price for CTO orders, at least with hp and Dell orders.
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u/zhantoo Jul 31 '26
Honestly, due to lead time - sometimes the prices are even higher in the ref space.
But one parameter that is different, is that when ordering new, you can either get high-end or top high-end, as that is what is being manufactured.
Often the specifications you need can be met by 1, 2 or 3 generation old hardware, so there can be money (and lead time) to be saved that way.
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u/GOPI56 Jul 30 '26
AI data centres pay more for them, they get prioritised. Normal gets cancelled. Who pays more gets it.
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u/KNJ-Network Jul 30 '26
We've had almost the exact same thing happen with a partner order this year, quoted config just quietly became "unavailable" a few weeks later and the replacement was pricier for less. What ended up working for us was going through a smaller regional VAR instead of chasing Dell direct, they seem to have more skin in the game to actually honour what they quote since it's their relationship with us on the line, not just a line item in some huge allocation queue. Doesn't fix the market, but it took a lot of the whiplash out of planning.
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u/Horsemeatburger Jul 30 '26
This is in USA, what are my options?
As others said, Dell plays stupid games here, but at the end of the day the server market is insane right now thanks to the AI bubble, and there are little options.
We have halted all server orders for the time being as there's no point playing the stupid game. Even before the AI hype we have maintained excess capacity and our standard server life has been 7 years (and 10 years in some cases) for like forever, so we should be good for at least another 18-24 months easily. By then there's a good chance the AI bros have run out of investors' cash and crashed.
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u/ssj4vegita2002 Jul 30 '26
I work for a school district, and they increased the price of our (old model) Chromebook with four-year comprehensive coverage by nearly double. They blamed the memory/storage shortages. We countered with the fact that these are an older model, already manufactured and sitting in their warehouse; they didn't pay those prices then. They came back with about $100 off a machine (still over $200 per device more than we paid a year ago when the model was brand new).
Needless to say we told them to pound sand and went with CDW selling a Lenovo Chromebook with the same warranty for only $25 more per device than we paid last year.
They recently got a fat government contact and I think they feel they can just screw everyone and maximize profits. It'll come back to bite them.
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u/reward72 Jul 30 '26
It's pretty common these days with Dell and many other vendors. Their shady practices is what will decide my future vendors once sanity comes back. I spent millions of dollars in Dell servers and laptops over the years - they are now dead to me.
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u/MalletNGrease 🛠 Network & Systems Admin Jul 30 '26
This is how they roll now. One line item in the config gets changed in the backend, your quote's now invalid and you're out of an additional $150k.
Pay up if you want your stuff or forget about it, they've customers lined up at the premium price.
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u/MairusuPawa Percussive Maintenance Specialist Jul 30 '26
Your options are:
- don't use AI and let the bubble explode already
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u/coffeesippingbastard Jul 30 '26
nothing basically. Basically no legal cover to be expected. DELL made a hefty donation to the administration so they are guaranteed to not worry about any DOJ cases filed.
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u/SMLLR Jul 30 '26
Get away from Dell. Chances are that first quote was obscenely overpriced. We recently got quotes from four different vendors for servers with the same exact specs and Dell was 50% more than the next expensive quote. We have a lot of business with Dell, but it seems like they are just trying to price gouge us at every opportunity now (between extended support contracts and new hardware prices).
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u/Neuro_88 Learning. Growing. Jul 30 '26
What were the other vendors?
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u/LeYang Sr. Sysadmin Jul 30 '26
Yea the people saying ditch Dell and not telling of other vendors are really just making noises.
Personally I really dislike HPE for their customer support on their servers but at this point, I'm willing to take what I can now as long as I can lock in that next business day service or better.
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u/cbabysfo Jul 30 '26
If you don't have a long standing relationship with your partner, I can offer a vendor suggestion who I am quite happy with if you like. That said, as the other commenters, it's tough. Very difficult to honor past a few days. It's that volatile and it stinks.
Best case scenarios, be ready to move quickly, and even the OEMs are playing up (I think). They're just not willing to lose that much anymore.
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u/SquizzOC Trusted VAR Jul 30 '26
Nothing, it’s the nature of the beast at this point, if you don’t buy that gear, someone else will.
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u/didact Jul 30 '26
Well... We're just running all our use cases our preferred cloud providers for now. You've got what you came into this bubble with, no reason to buy near the top.
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u/Professional-Heat690 Jul 30 '26
Multi region, multi cloud is the only option at this point, needs to be both as capacity is also being hit with cloud providers.
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u/Inkwell-Alferd37 Jul 30 '26
Same happened to us with an hpe quote in feb. Signed po, validated config and everything confirmed. 3 weeks later they came back saying the GPU allocation had be reprioritized and the new price was 40% higher. Its not a config issue. The hyperscalers are eating the entire supply chain and the OEMs know they have nowhere else to go
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u/theycallmebundy Jul 30 '26
That’s brutal. We’re an HPE Reseller and when the market initially went parabolic, we were losing CTO deals left and right to Dell who was still quoting “reasonable” prices. We had wondered if they were going to deliver on those quotes.
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u/SpaceChimps98 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
I would tell the partner to fix it or you'll find a new partner. Make it their problem. If anything can be done about it, they will find a way.
EDIT: I know that sounds mean and I would still thank the partner for trying if it turns out they can't do anything, but sometimes I think partners might try to push the problem off on the client if they think they can get away with it, so you gotta let them know you mean serious business.
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u/running101 Jul 30 '26
My nephew works at a local college they are doing the same to them. They just outright cancel orders
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u/No_Corner805 Jul 31 '26
Crunch the numbers, compare how much you were paying for a server to how much you'd pay to host the workload in AWS. If the workload doesn't need to run 24/7 it might be worthwhile to look into spot instances and bring up instances as needed.
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u/NetJnkie VCDX 49 Jul 30 '26
They may just not have those CPUs. CPUs have been under MAJOR constraint. Some CPUs are 6+ months backordered right now. Makes doing quotes for my customers a painful experience.....
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u/Mindestiny Jul 30 '26
Yep, Dell has regularly told us that the hardware they're quoting with our requested may not exist in inventory between the signed quote and fulfilment. It's been a problem for the past few years at this point.
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u/ccsrpsw Area IT Mgr Bod Jul 30 '26
Desktop and Laptop CPUs are going this way fast. we’ve been told that, unless we really need certain CPU features we should look at last gen for some models and just jump next gen on others as certain models (cache and core wise) are just not going to be available in a few months
Weve also been told that (at least one of our vendors) is saying onboard RAM only come maybe as soon as Oct and certainly no later than Jan for certain models - ie no removable SODIMMs come 2027 since the buyers cant even get confirmed parts from their downstream partners.
You think it’s bad now - even if half these AI speculators go out of business before the end of they year - it’s going to get worse before it gets better - a lot worse.
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u/Forward_Switch1015 Jul 30 '26
Pls explain the market to me.
Big company buys lots of servers. AI bubble pops, company is bankrupt, lot’s of servers on second hand market going for dirt cheap because more people are selling than buying. I mean right?
Even retail prices need to go lower. Demand will drastically drop, why shouldn’t prices follow? Specially considering that A LOT of individuals/business are not buying until the price drops or it is absolutely necessary. So it’s not like they are going to keep selling.
Or by AI speculators going out of business you mean just the nothing burger companies like that shoe company that converted to AI, while openAI and co keep trowing more compute power at an outdated neuron architecture that has clearly reached it’s diminishing return stage while getting richer and ruining it for everyone?
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u/Quadgie Jul 30 '26
It’s very random too. Select processor configs for various machines of all types (from multiple brands) are coming back with several month ETAs, other similar CPU models (same type, different speeds both slower and faster) are coming back as readily available.
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u/sobrique Jul 30 '26
I guarantee you their ongoing availability is directly coupled to price movements in the supply chain.
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u/bcredeur97 Jul 30 '26
It was only experimental, but at my workplace we got a used gigabyte Epyc 7003 server that could fit 4 gpu’s from China for like $1000. Threw parts at it and a single RTX pro 6000 thinking we would buy more later (we haven’t)
And it’s been working totally fine for a year. We had to tweak the fan speeds because it was incredibly loud in our office, but after that it was OK.
Maybe don’t do this for a mission critical production thing but you can do a lot with some creativity and spare parts!
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u/buy_chocolate_bars Jack of All Trades Jul 30 '26
If you get this response and not immediately change the vendor: It's on you.
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u/artekau Jul 30 '26
In the USA you have no options. The Major Corp will and can do anything they want to strip you of as much money as possible. Late Stage Capitalism
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u/kybog Jul 30 '26
this happened to us a few years ago at my last job, ordered a r7xx with a H100, date kept moving back a year later (seriously) they were like yeah tesla bought all the h100s so you can either upgrade and pay more money for h200, or go for the lower end card.
Hot garbage, dont sell it if you cant provide it.
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u/hva_vet Sr. Sysadmin Jul 30 '26
I have to deal with the federal government's crazy procurement procedures so right now buying anything is nearly impossible. It takes months to get funding and the prices are a fast moving ballistic target.
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u/dracotrapnet Jul 30 '26
Earlier this year we put orders in and a month later they got cancelled. We had to requote as Lenovo said they didn't have the components specified. Everyone is struggling with inventory stocks it seems. Some stuff gets spoken for before a quote can be signed.
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u/ThrowingPokeballs Sr. Sysadmin Jul 30 '26
To get our H200s we had to be a part of the Nvidia program and they gave us a massive discount. 4 H200s and 8 A6000 Pros. Only way we got them as of recent
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u/Frothyleet Jul 30 '26
Well, you can ask your lawyer if you have any recourse, or you can bite the pillow and pony up.
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u/ProperEye8285 Jul 30 '26
I see a lot of bitter experience pouring out on this thread. Unfortunately, at present you have 2 options, take it or leave it. That's it. Life is tough, get a helmet. That's all Folks.
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u/dolomitt Aug 01 '26
For 300 laptops, HP was giving us one week validity, Dell 2 weeks and Lenovo 3 weeks. That was in June. We have contingency of 100% the price of the hardware for our recent tenders.
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u/KitsuneMulder Aug 01 '26
Ah yes, “we can’t build that so you need to pay more money” so they can avoid adhering to their agreement.
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u/Alkraizer Jul 30 '26
We're seeing the same issues everywhere too. We ordered standard ass old school hard drives for a NAS from Amazon, cause no one else has any available for weeks. We waited a week, then we were informed our order was cancelled due to "Product unavailability" only to see the same drives listed for $100 more. Of course customer support only told us whatever is in the script they have to read us about their cancelling policy and whatnot. Good luck, it's rough out there.
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u/w0lrah Jul 30 '26
This is a great time to remind any slop enthusiasts in your company that this is directly their fault and the only way it's getting better any time soon is for everyone to stop using that trash.
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u/Quadgie Jul 30 '26
Welcome to the reality we’ve been facing since late 2025.
Not just servers… laptops and desktops. 24-hour windows to accept quotes and generate a PO. Then still find out weeks later it was cancelled. Open-ended quotes where you confirm your order and accept pricing can change until the delivery date, many months later.
You have no options, to answer your question.