Stop bringing Balenciaga. Start Making SSD and RAM.

Three years back, I bought a server for my company. 600GB RAM. 64-core processor. 4 x 4TB SSDs. A super motherboard. Gold-standard redundant power supplies. Everything. It was the most expensive one I had ever purchased.
Total bill: ₹7.5 lakh +GST.

Last week, I tried to get an SSD as a backup for that server. Samsung PM9A3, the exact same drive.
Quote: ₹1.8 lakh. Each.
Means ₹7.2 lakh for four.

The four SSDs alone today cost almost what the entire server cost in 2023.

What the actual f*ck?

SSDs and RAM prices have gone through the roof. 250% increase in one year. 70% in the last 2 months. Component distributors and vendors are working as if they are in the BSE trader ring in 1990 - abhi ka rate yeh, shaam tak rate badh gaya, subah aur badh gaya. Quotation valid for 1 week? Pff, that era is over.

People are saying there will be no relief till 2027. And based on what’s happened since 2019, I doubt prices will EVER be allowed to come back down. (Thank you PEs and VCs.)

Gone are the good old days where Economies of Scale, Automation, Inventions, and China were quietly bringing the cost of goods down every year. It was a simpler, better time.

The reason is the usual suspect: AI.

Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon are buying every piece of AI hardware they can get their hands on. The manufacturers are limited and are happy to oblige. Margins on AI hardware are much higher, so they’re shifting production there. Normal RAM and SSDs used in laptops or low-end servers like ours are not being made enough. Supply shortage. Prices through the roof.

The market is doing exactly what markets do.

But hey, the textbook says: when prices go up, supply comes in. Someone, somewhere, sees the margin and starts building. Adam Smith called it the Invisible Hand and how it always drives market efficiency.

Where the hell is the market’s “invisible hand”?
Specifically, where the hell is India’s “someone”?

We have a generational shortage in something every Indian business needs (directly or indirectly) - storage and memory for servers. Every country runs on servers. Tally. Banking. GST. UPI. Your kid’s CBSE marks card. Every single “Digital India” claim is sitting on hardware we don’t make and can’t make.

So who’s going to fix this?

In a healthy economy, the answer is the people with the money, the talent, and the political capital. Which in India means a very specific list of (family) names.

Let’s see what those family names are actually doing.

Reliance. Has signed franchise agreements with about 85 luxury brands. Balenciaga, Valentino, Tod’s, Sandro, Maje. Jio World Plaza in BKC built to house them. JioMart in 1,000 cities. 600+ dark stores. Campa Cola. Independence Atta. Reliance Jewels. India’s largest trading operation, just digitized and renamed.

Birla. Three new businesses in the last two years, in their own words. Birla Opus (paints, ₹10,000 crore). Indriya (jewellery, ₹5,000 crore). B2B e-commerce for building materials. The group literally said: “India today is teeming with dynamism, audacity, and a penchant for disruption.” The disruption being - and I cannot stress this enough - paint and jewellery.

JSW. Wants to create a “Maruti Moment” with electric vehicles. The actual plan: import a hybrid SUV from Chery, slap JSW branding on it, assemble it here. Initial phase is full CBU import from China. They have officially written to the Industries Ministry asking the government to fast-track approvals for its Chinese suppliers of safety glass. Parts Chinese, gaadi Chinese, design Chinese - sirf naam Indian. Seedhe seedhe bolo, importer hain.

Premji Invest and Catamaran Ventures. Two of the largest family offices in the country, built on IT money. Cheques flow into e-commerce listing optimization tools, Amazon seller tools, payment plumbing, food delivery, real estate. Funding more traders, with better tools to trade more efficiently. Not a single visible bet on the one thing these founders actually have the credentials to do something about.

Bharti. Built one of the largest telecoms in the world. Telecom infrastructure runs on chips imported from everywhere. Zero chip play.

Bajaj. Hero. Mahindra. Dabur. Sun Pharma. Serum. All sitting on enough cash to fund 3-4 fabs between them. All quietly parked in family offices, real estate, AIFs, listed equity, Movie Studio (Goddamnit!). Wealth managers’ dream. Builders’ nightmare.

Look - I understand. The only goal is to earn money, and wherever it comes from easily is the best place to earn it. Honestly, I’d do the same.

But agar itna andha “Escobar paisa” hai, toh kuch toh milkar ek SSD/RAM/Processor mein invest karo please. Kuch toh number ghumaao Samsung ka, Micron ka, WD ka. “Bhai, yahan ke India operations main sambhal lunga. Kuch JV kar lo. Tech transfer kar lo. Plant lagao.”

To be fair, Adani is doing a lot of the infrastructure work this country actually needs: ports, airports, power, transmission, cement, data centres. And a few names have started something on the chip side. But for a country that consumes the chips we consume? It’s not remotely enough.

If you want sovereignty, you build the chips.
If you want headlines, you import luxury labels and call it “premiumization.”

These are the same people who, in every interview, talk about risk-taking and nation-building. The actual risk being - bear with me - renting French logos and rebranding Chinese imports.

Here is my thesis: Our conglomerates and business families are doing what is possible with MBAs. And this is what is actually possible with MBAs alone:

You CAN crush under-capitalized players.
You CAN poach Sales and Marketing people from Asian Paints.
You CAN acquire a loss-making, D2C brand at 10x the Revenue multiple.
You CAN copy a playbook for selling Atta, FMCG, skincare, jewellery, or quick commerce to Indian consumers.
None of this is rocket science.
All my IIM grad friends could have built the deck after two years into their strategy roles.

What you CANNOT do with MBAs alone is make hardware.
You cannot acquire Samsung. You cannot acquire Micron. You cannot acquire SK Hynix. You cannot poach your way into a 28nm process.

Hard problems are hard. That’s the point.

You have the money. Birla Opus is ₹10,000 crore. Indriya is ₹5,000 crore. JSW Motors is committing ₹14,000 crore at one plant. Reliance Retail’s quick commerce build-out has cost more than India’s entire semiconductor mission budget for 2025-26. Money is not the constraint.

You have the recruiters. Every one of you has run aggressive hiring drives across decades. You can pull anyone from anywhere. The Indians running global tech and chip companies - bring them home. You have the chequebooks.

You have the political contacts. Land is not an issue. Subsidies are not an issue. For you. For the rest of us, it is a different story. But for you, state and central governments line up.

You said you were the risk-takers.
You said it was about nation-building.
Saying it is not the same as doing it.

The thing that hurts the most is the cost to every other Indian business. We need servers to do anything serious in this country.

ERPs run on servers.

Software runs on servers. Whoever writes the software - AI or human - the code still has to run somewhere.

Video editing isn’t dead either. AI will generate a lot of it. But in this age of AI video slop everywhere, you need better skills and better machines than ever to make something that’s actually good and worth watching. (Unless you make slop. Then please carry on.)

Every single thing Digital India depends on, sits on hardware that gets more expensive every quarter.

You suggest cloud? Cloud is just someone else’s server. Same expensive SSDs. Same expensive RAM. With a margin layer on top. The cost lands on every Indian company eventually - whether they pay AWS and Azure, or buy on-prem like I do. There is no escape route.

We need cheap servers.
Just like we need cheap logistics.
Just like we need cheap power.
These are foundational.
If your nation-building plan is to give Indians more options in lipstick and acrylic emulsion paint, you are not building a nation. You are building a mall.

Stop bringing Balenciaga.
Start making SSD and RAM.

Stop building paint brand number twenty-five.
Build a wafer fab.

Stop renaming Chinese imports as Indian EVs.
Build a memory fab and call it whatever you want - I promise we’ll cheer harder.

Opening a jewellery division could have waited 10 years. India was not running out of gold. The retail businesses you’re crushing today are not going anywhere. But the hardware window is closing in real time. The global incumbents - Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron, WD, TSMC - gain economies of scale every quarter. The entry costs keep rising for you. Their advantage keeps widening. Either Indian conglomerates enter this fight now, or they won’t be able to enter it later. And we’ll keep watching our server prices be unaffordable.

You have the money. You have the talent network. You have a government that has literally written a 50% subsidy into law.

Risk lo, sir. Asli wala.
Please.