If you thought the memory shortage was already hurting the consumer PC market, then Jeff Bezos has another dastardly plan to get into your wallet: renting PCs entirely from the cloud.

In a truly bizarre rambling speech at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit late last year, the billionaire essentially said the quiet part out loud. I’ll leave you to make sense of his own inane analogy before pontificating further: “AI, modern AI, is a horizontal enabling layer. It can be used to improve everything. It will be in everything.

“I went to a brewery in Luxembourg, many years ago now, in fact, this trip was one of the little, tiny catalysts for the founding of AWS. The Brewery was 300 years old. A lot of the oldest companies in the world are breweries, by the way, I don’t know why that is. They were very proud of their history and had a museum. And in that museum was an electric power generator, 100 years old, and because when they wanted to improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity, there was no power grid, so they had to build their own power station. So they made their own electricity. And at that time, that's what everybody did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric generator. And I looked at this, and I thought, this is what computation is like today. Everybody has their own data center, and that's not going to last. It makes no sense. You're going to buy the compute off the grid. That's AWS.

“These kind of horizontal layers, like electricity and compute and now artificial intelligence, they go everywhere. I guarantee you, there is not a single application that you can think of that's not gonna be made better by AI.”

To bring you back from the world of Bezos then, what the billionaire basically said, besides waffling about the historical power position of beer makers, is that he envisions a future whereby we, as consumers, rent our compute from providers like AWS.

Think about that for a second: no inner hardware inside your PC at home. Simply the ability to type, perform actions with a mouse, and a connection to a massive data center that serves you a bit of computing power.

Well, I’m sorry, Jeff, but please, sir, I want some more.

While that might work fine for folks building high-end AI models out of the comfort of their own homes, this will only end up squeezing gamers, a group already maligned by the companies that once catered to them, only to now seek that sweet, sweet AI money.

Cloud computing meets an industry that's already abandoned its customers

You might be a gamer, or, then again, the last game you might have played was "Wii Sports." But whether you care or not about the gaming market, you need to know just how bad things are for gamers today. We're essentially cash cows.

Here at SDxCentral, we've written at length about the memory malaise and how the greed of a couple of corporations seeking to shore up their supply chains led to everyone else fighting over hardware scraps. You might say, that’s capitalism, baby. But on the gaming and consumer PC side, it’s the customers who are left with the crumbs.

There’s talk Nvidia might put a pin in production of its entire RTX 50-series line of GPUs amid a shortage of memory. All the while, some operators have been buying up the high-end consumer graphics card just to fuel their insatiable demand for anything AI. Meanwhile, Micron has upsticked altogether from the consumer market to chase the proverbial AI bone. And general-purpose laptop makers are even shipping mid-tier units with just eight gigabytes (GB) of system RAM, going back to computer memory levels not seen since the early 2010s.

In addition to memory price hikes, there’s aggressive monetization and the constant push for in-game purchases, developers treating staff appallingly, and the complete disregard for titles should they not meet studio expectations, meaning some games, like BioWare’s "Anthem," are simply unplayable as their dedicated servers are shut down well ahead of their time.

It's good to show contempt for your audience. Just ask Razer, the company with the tagline “by gamers, for gamers.” What was its big showcase at CES this year? A cylindrical desk companion, sorry, AI "copilot", in the form of an anime waifu who helps plan your day or provides gaming tips. Who honestly asked for this?

With all this tomfoolery, you might well say, "well if you want enough computing power to run 'Space Marine II' at 1080p, 60 fps, but can't get the hardware, maybe Jeff Bezos’s idea isn’t so bad?"

Just think about it: we already have subscriptions up the wazoo for streaming television, meal prep services, and mobile phones. "AWS for Gamers" would add yet another cost just to play.

Gamers have long been used to subscription services, what with Xbox Live, PlayStation Plus, and "World of Warcraft." But Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass has already eliminated the need for physical games, providing access to hundreds of games for a monthly fee. Then along comes cloud gaming, eliminating the need to even download those games, instead letting you stream hundreds of titles directly from your device.

But the sheer levels of low latency required to play those games at the visual quality PC gamers have come to expect are astronomical. Infrastructure providers and carriers are already wrangling with the need to boost bandwidth just so you can scroll endless TikToks or Insta Reels. Now you want to stream "Red Dead Redemption II" at high-frame rates?

Such a feat is not impossible to imagine. Cloud gaming makes sense if you’re on the go, or in the sad case of many today, not having the memory to install the ridiculous file sizes of titles like "Call of Duty" (often more than 200 GB).

But allowing PC gamers to have their own dedicated hardware to run their own games in their own homes at their own expense is far more feasible than creating mammoth cathedrals to compute that require massive amounts of power and water just to be able to stream something like "Doki Doki Literature Club!"

Consumers want choice. The choice to choose how to run their games. Not to be told you’ll have your bit of rental compute and you’ll like it.

Gamers are only just waking up to the fact that they don’t actually own a lot of their games, but instead a license to play them. Now they could face a future where they don’t even own the hardware powering those games that aren’t actually theirs.

The future is an awful place. But at least I’ve got my trust GTX 1660 Super … a seven-year-old graphics card that struggles to play "Warhammer 40,000: Darktide" on medium to low graphics. But at least it’s mine, Jeff.