The RAM shortage could last years
by omer_k on 4/19/2026, 7:18:44 AM
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/914672/the-ram-shortage-could-last-years
Comments
by: 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.<p>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.<p>Soo ... how sure are we that the memory makers themselves are not going to be the ones holding the bag?
4/19/2026, 8:32:03 AM
by: fouc
I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of Google's TurboQuant[0] introduced 26 days prior.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513475">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513475</a>
4/19/2026, 8:08:07 AM
by: LastTrain
Something I haven’t been able to reconcile: If AI makes software easier to create, that will drive the price down. How are software companies going to make enough revenue to pay for AI, when the amount of money being spent on AI is already multiples of the current total global expenditure on software? This demand for RAM is built on a foundation of sand, there will be a glut of capacity when it all shakes out.
4/20/2026, 3:58:36 AM
by: 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.
4/19/2026, 9:14:12 PM
by: chintech2
I'm a bit surprised the article makes no mention of China's new memory companies.<p>[0] <a href="https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-cxmt-nand-dram-expansion/" rel="nofollow">https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...</a>
4/19/2026, 9:01:15 AM
by: nilkn
As an aside, recently I wanted to refresh my gaming PC, but the price shock and general lack of availability of buying components individually made it seem hardly worth it, so I just kept deferring the project.<p>Then, mostly by chance, I saw that my local Microcenter had some pre-builts for sale, and I ended up picking one up for <$5k that had "best in slot" components across the board, including a 5090 and even a high-end power supply.<p>The last time I built a gaming PC was upwards of a decade ago, and at that time the prevailing wisdom was to never buy a pre-built unless you had a massive amount of disposable income and couldn't spare even just one weekend to dedicate to a hobby project that could benefit you for years. Now, it was absolutely a no-brainer.
4/20/2026, 2:32:25 AM
by: tim-projects
The era of optimisation is finally here. I'm excited.
4/19/2026, 8:13:17 AM
by: rzmmm
It seems that RAM manufacturers are still reluctant to increase production. They know something that investors don't about long term RAM demands?
4/19/2026, 8:44:42 AM
by: 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.
4/19/2026, 11:41:56 PM
by: 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.
4/19/2026, 8:30:15 AM
by: thelastgallon
It will last forever. After covid, all manufacturers understood the value of limiting supply and extracting profits. Cars used to super cheap before covid, they will never go back to the same levels.<p>From now on, RAM will always be super costly for consumers, because they can't make massive deals like Apple/OpenAI/etc. We are the bagholders.
4/20/2026, 6:40:19 AM
by: 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.
4/19/2026, 9:45:47 AM
by: fsckboy
if a shortage lasts years, it's not a shortage. "The market clearing price of RAM in the face of expected sustained healthy demand should lead to a stable market for years."<p>even if gaming is and will remain very popular for years, it and the desire to upgrade gaming rigs is still a discretionary activity with more price elasticity of demand than corporate uses for RAM in the dawn of the AI age. gamers live on the margin of this market, where low prices will stimulate upgrades and high prices will lead to holding out. The complaints about price are real, but that segment of the market is some combination of less large and less important.
4/19/2026, 11:56:42 PM
by: thijson
I've read that the chip manufacturers are looking into high bandwidth flash for on package storage of ai models. That would solve some of the cost issue, flash is significantly cheaper than dram.
4/20/2026, 2:17:23 AM
by: 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.
4/19/2026, 9:06:03 AM
by: BirAdam
Of course, alternatively, the AI companies could go bust before finding profitability. Then, there’d be a ton of supply, prices would crash, and one or two of the current memory suppliers would go out of business. After that, the new Chinese memory companies might be producing at volume, and Renesas could be up and running.<p>At the moment, nothing is certain. Could this last? Sure. Could it not last? Yup.
4/20/2026, 12:51:56 AM
by: 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.
4/19/2026, 11:18:58 PM
by: rldjbpin
let the analyst and news say what they want - the entire situation is artificial and is up to the manufacturers.<p>the current relative spike in the prices misses the medium-term trend of the vast decrease in memory price post-covid that led to the recent surge. the cartel got another opportunity to make bank and they will use that lever to the max.<p>funnily enough i've been personally stuck with 16 gigs since 2015, across three memory generations! but i am used to the past when you would spend 80-100 on an 8gb stick (jdec timings, nothing fancy but from a major brand) without accounting for inflation.
4/20/2026, 10:18:03 AM
by: librasteve
The RAM market is a square wave
4/20/2026, 5:42:26 AM
by: p0w3n3d
We have the saying in my country: The days of things being cheap are over.
4/20/2026, 8:00:15 AM
by: onchainintel
Your instincts are likely right on this one OP. Memory prices surged 80–90% in Q1 2026 compared to Q4 2025, DRAM, NAND, and HBM all at record highs. 3 suppliers for the entire planet?
4/20/2026, 5:48:33 AM
by: 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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
4/19/2026, 9:06:18 PM
by: vectorhacker
It sounds to me like an incentive for new companies to make RAM.
4/20/2026, 2:58:19 AM
by: shevy-java
I want those AI companies that drove the prices up, to pay an immediate back-tax to all of us.<p>I don't want to pay more because of AI companies driving the price up. That is milking.
4/19/2026, 8:16:59 PM
by: ares623
Are we entering the Reverse-Moore's Law era.
4/20/2026, 4:10:31 AM
by: 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.<p>Think I will scrap my PC and sell its parts.<p>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?
4/19/2026, 8:51:47 AM
by: alprado50
Im thankfull for buying 16gb of RAM, but what is gonna happen in 5 years when users PCs start to fail?
4/20/2026, 3:57:57 AM
by: cicko
Usually, right after articles like this, things come crashing down.
4/20/2026, 7:58:22 PM
by: cozzyd
I bought a workstation with 3 TB of ram for FDTD simulations last year. Glad I got it then ...
4/19/2026, 11:21:23 PM
by: cylemons
When I personally use chatgpt and friends, I am not seeing any slowdowns or anything, meaning that their servers can handle the loads just fine. So then, why are these companies spending so much building new capacity if the current capacity is enough?
4/20/2026, 10:12:24 AM
by: WhereIsTheTruth
Fabricated shortage to fasten US Chip Act and US Chip Security Act
4/19/2026, 8:41:34 PM
by: zizheruan
Sad news, I didn't buy enough RAM before....
4/20/2026, 4:03:27 AM
by: 5255652
Can we stop advertising paid Blog/News websites we can't read without a subscription.
4/20/2026, 4:58:37 AM
by: Gud
Thank god they shut down 3D XPoint.
4/19/2026, 8:53:49 AM
by: bschwindHN
But thank god we were all able to generate some SVGs of pelicans, right guys?
4/20/2026, 12:59:37 AM
by: marcus_holmes
This could be great.<p>There's a future where RAM makers tool up for this massively increased demand, then the AI companies go broke as the bubble bursts, so RAM is cheap as. So laptop manufacturers get on that and start making laptops with 1TB+ memory so we can run decent LLMs on the local machine. Everyone happy :)
4/20/2026, 1:44:32 AM
by: ochre-ogre
can't read the article due to a paywall.
4/19/2026, 8:03:15 AM
by: Chrisszz
[dead]
4/20/2026, 7:49:24 AM
by: black_13
[dead]
4/19/2026, 9:53:05 PM
by: coldtea
Expect shortages across the board. RAM? That's the tip of the iceberg, think food and gas.
4/19/2026, 9:39:24 PM
by: 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.<p>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.
4/19/2026, 10:03:54 AM