The RAM shortage could last years

ochre-ogre

can't read the article due to a paywall.

fouc

I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of Google's TurboQuant[0] introduced 26 days prior. Given that TurboQuant results in a 6x reduction in memory usage for KV caches and up to 8x boost in speed, this optimization is already showing up in llama.cpp, enabling significantly bigger contexts without having to run a smaller model to fit it all in memory. Some people thought it might significantly improve the RAM situation, though I remain a bit skeptical - the demand is probably still larger than the reduction turboquant brings. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513475

tim-projects

The era of optimisation is finally here. I'm excited.

WesolyKubeczek

I fear that the real reason we do have a shortage, I mean, the real reason for the demand, is AI companies scooping what they can so that their competitors, whether existing or incumbent, can’t get to it.

stuxnet79

Ok so Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron do not have the capacity to meet demand. Also, what little capacity they do have they are allocating to HBM over DRAM. Based on my limited knowledge HBM can not be easily repurposed for consumer electronics. Translation: main street is cooked for the next 3-4 years. It doesn't stop there though. OpenAI is currently mired in a capital crunch. Their last round just about sucked all the dry powder out of the private markets. Folks are now starting to ask difficult questions about their burn rate and revenue. It is increasingly looking like they might not commit to the purchase order they made which kick-started this whole panic over RAM. Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?

rzmmm

It seems that RAM manufacturers are still reluctant to increase production. They know something that investors don't about long term RAM demands?

tomaytotomato

I just checked my gaming PC I built a few years ago with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, its actually gone up in value, that is unheard of generally. Think I will scrap my PC and sell its parts. I wonder if there are any niche companies building decent rigs with DDR3 and 5/6th generation Intel CPUs out there, it is cheap and might be a business opportunity?

Gud

Thank god they shut down 3D XPoint.

chintech2

I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of China's new memory companies. [0] https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...

Hamuko

I'm personally hoping that one of the AI or data center companies is suddenly unable to pay for their bills and deflate the entire industry. Probably the only hope of things getting better before the 2030s.

lousken

If only we have not allowed oligopolies to exist. Meanwhile, EU is not in the race at all and US has very few fabs.

sph

I fear the author and most commenters are not aware of the law of demand and supply. If there is demand for consumer RAM, there will be supply for consumer RAM. It just takes time and risk-assessment to scale up operations. We have RAM shortage now, we will have very cheap RAM tomorrow. It’s not like production is bottlenecked by raw materials. Chip companies just need to assess if the demand by AI companies will last so it’s better to scale up, or perhaps they should wait it out instead of oversupplying and cutting into their profits.

shevy-java

I want those AI companies that drove the prices up, to pay an immediate back-tax to all of us. I don't want to pay more because of AI companies driving the price up. That is milking.

WhereIsTheTruth

Fabricated shortage to fasten US Chip Act and US Chip Security Act

jmyeet

This is simple extrapolation from current demand, nothing more. And that's a borderline silly analysis because it assumes the AI bubble won't burst. The great misadventure in the Persian Gulf probably accelerates that because we're almost certainly going to be facing a recession. Another thing I've been thinking about is what happens when the next generation of NVidia chips comes out? I suspect NVidia is going to delay this to milk the current demand but at some point you'll be able to buy something that's better than the H100 or B200 or whatever the current state-of-the-art for half the price. And what's that going to do to the trillions in AI DC investment? I'm interested when the next bump in DRAM chip density is coming. That's going to change things although it seems like much of production has moved from consumer DRAM chips to HBM chips. So maybe that won't help at all. I do think that companies will start seeing little ot no return from billions spent on AI and that's going to be aproblem. I also think that the hudnreds of billions of capital expenditure of OpenAI is going to come crashing down as there just isn't any even theoretical future revenue that can pay for all that.

cbdevidal

I’m a bit of an optimist. I think this will smack the hands of developers who don’t manage RAM well and future apps will necessarily be more memory-efficient.

coldtea

Expect shortages across the board. RAM? That's the tip of the iceberg, think food and gas.

1o1o1o1o1

Hilarious, The ram in my PC i built 5 years ago is will soon be worth more than i spent on building the whole PC.

cozzyd

I bought a workstation with 3 TB of ram for FDTD simulations last year. Glad I got it then ...

senfiaj

I wonder if this might motivate to write more memory efficient software. I mean we have so much memory, but even some trivial programs eat hundreds of megabytes of ram.