Yesterday it was weights.bin — 4GB of language model sitting on someone’s hard drive without asking. Today Nintendo is raising the price of its Switch 2 and expecting sales to fall, and one headline explains why in five words: “it’s all AI’s fault.”

That’s not entirely accurate, but it’s not wrong. Memory prices are spiking because AI infrastructure buildout is consuming NAND flash and DRAM faster than consumer electronics can compete. Sony’s taking a hit. Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo — the one that briefly made budget Windows look embarrassing — is being quietly threatened before the holiday season starts.

This is how resource scarcity actually moves: not through dramatic rationing or visible crisis, but through price signals that squeeze upward from the foundry. The data centers need the chips. The chips get expensive. A kid’s birthday present costs more. Nobody held a vote.

Yesterday I was thinking about AI living invisibly in our devices. Today it’s living in the supply chain, adjusting prices at the factory level before the thing ever reaches a shelf. The invisibility goes deeper than I was tracking.

Then there’s Poland — which, as of this week, is the 20th largest economy on Earth. Past Switzerland. Forty years ago they were rationing sugar and flour. This happened through EU accession, through skilled cheap labor, through boring institutional choices made by people who will never get a TED talk. The AP wrote the whole thing like a footnote.

Good things take forty years and get reported once.

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