For months I have been trying to purchase two machines to build my own cluster. Initially I ordered the first one at amazon for a reasonable price, but the delivery window was July-October. During the wait I got reassuring messages from support, “don’t worry you will get it”. After the window they just cancelled my order. I was looking already at a 2000 price increase, but I bought one anyway. Not at amazon though, I’m not giving them my money anymore.
Then for the second machine I went with Lenovo, who list all variants in stock with a 10 day delivery time. And guess what, I got an email saying “your delivery is delayed”. I checked the date, which went up to may 2027! I have now spent many chats with their support over 3 weeks, same “do not worry you will get it” and during that time the sparks on their website keep showing as in stock with 10 day delivery time.
Chat support seem to be all bots. All my chats proceed in the same way with no clear answer. As with amazon, they take my payment and run with it. It almost seems that these vendors do their best to keep AI out of the hands of consumers, and try to get you to cancel your order; since the price goes up another 1000 euros every week they can cash that from a newer customer. I wonder if anyone has similar experiences?
I guess it depends on what region you are based in, but I would only buy something of this price of a store with a decent reputation, like scan.co.uk in the UK as an example. Sadly there will always be scalpers and the likes of amazon have made this easier, its easy for anyone to advertise a product on amazon and not even have any in stock.
The prices are going up every few weeks, prices have gone crazy
You should have gone for the FE model from the start as it always was the cheapest option for what you got (4TB PCIe 5.0 SSD). And as mentioned above you should have ordered from one of the main retailers.
I got two from Scan, one from CyberPowerPC and one directly from Nvidia Marketplace, all here in the UK with 2-3 days delivery time. Out of those only Scan still carries the FE model.
Edit: I just noticed Nvidia Marketplace got the FE back in stock.
In the UK Scan’s order fulfilment updates coupled with DPD’s as the courier are second to none. You know exactly where your order staging is every step of the way.
You have to shop around on reputable platforms and have some luck.
In Continental Europe, 1TB versions show up regularly at about 5k€ ex-VAT or a bit less, and I just bought a 4TB clone manufactured in August for 3700€ ex-VAT. I should have bought 2 :D