CES 2026 is over and it has revealed the situation with memory being consumed by AI companies is much worse than we initially thought.
What I heard on the ground floor from various system integrators, components manufacturers, and other companies, is memory supply has been tied up for all of 2026, and that shortages could last as long as until 2031.
Sure it’s scuttlebutt but wouldn’t surprise me as being true.
For the dram unfortunately won’t be possible to use it in the consumer space, at least not in the current form. Hbm is really server stuff, and as is, you cannot repurpose it. As for the GPUs, maybe they can be used for the consumer space but I am not entirely sure the specs would be wise to use it at home, since they need some very serious cooling capabilities, as well electricity consumption. Biggest winners of this pop in my opinion would be anyone who need cheap server rack stuff.
Part of it is not finished DRAM that was sold yet, it’s wafer capacity at the factory.
Sam Altman has promised orders for a kazillion wafers that don’t exist yet. It’s been argued this is less legitimate demand and more an effort to crimp the scaling ambitions of other competitors.
If his cheque bounces early on, the manufacturers are likely to reassign his slots to other buyers.
The manufacturers are taking a fair bit of risk though. If they aren’t getting paid before work starts, and the bubble pops in the middle, thry could end up with a lot of (partially or fully) finished wafers that they can’t just slice up and sell to Corsair and G.Skill.
You are not wrong about the reallocation part. However, if you see the actions from micron (fuck you micron BTW), they are going all in and having a shit storm in PR on the consumer side. If they are taking these risks without proper assurances, then they are utterly deranged
I’m not sure there’s a way to have proper assurances for such vast sums of silicon and money. You’re going with the flow of the speculation at that point. If it pops, their best hope is for bailouts to save them (not unrealistic, but their interlocutors will then be governments, not corporations).
You do have a good point that at a certain point it is not possible to have assurances as in values. However, there are other assurances that can be even more important, such as, contractual ones. If they do not have the proper assurances at that level too up to a certain point, then everyone is highly blindsided on the c suite.
But my biggest point has to do with burning a massive bridge, the consumers, and take a dive into this nonsense.
Promises of buying only work if the buyer still exists at the time you produce the goods.
Besides, I’m pretty sure that the main buyers type on the consumer side are PC and phone makers. So they could go back there almost unharmed.
This has happened before with LCD panels. I remember my mother’s work laptop had a 1900x1200 panel (back when they were still 4:3 aspect ratio). It was a mid-tier ThinkPad, not cheap but not crazy expensive.
A few years later, panel makers started pushing widescreen formats and user friendly language to “help us understand and make informed choices” like HD and FHD.
The resolution of HD? 1280x720.
High-definition was already a concept, but the idea of calling panels that were a huge step back in resolution “high-def” was exactly how they managed to extract more from consumers for less.
I’m sure they’ll find a way to mislead people into buying overly expensive RAM they don’t actually need.
“You totally need ECC for your HTPC bro, wouldn’t want cosmic rays to mess with your movies!”
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For the dram unfortunately won’t be possible to use it in the consumer space, at least not in the current form. Hbm is really server stuff, and as is, you cannot repurpose it. As for the GPUs, maybe they can be used for the consumer space but I am not entirely sure the specs would be wise to use it at home, since they need some very serious cooling capabilities, as well electricity consumption. Biggest winners of this pop in my opinion would be anyone who need cheap server rack stuff.
The RAM for 2026-2031 hasn’t been produced. It’s the production capacity that’s been bought out.
If the AI bubble bursts, the manufacturing can be reassigned.
Part of it is not finished DRAM that was sold yet, it’s wafer capacity at the factory.
Sam Altman has promised orders for a kazillion wafers that don’t exist yet. It’s been argued this is less legitimate demand and more an effort to crimp the scaling ambitions of other competitors.
If his cheque bounces early on, the manufacturers are likely to reassign his slots to other buyers.
The manufacturers are taking a fair bit of risk though. If they aren’t getting paid before work starts, and the bubble pops in the middle, thry could end up with a lot of (partially or fully) finished wafers that they can’t just slice up and sell to Corsair and G.Skill.
You are not wrong about the reallocation part. However, if you see the actions from micron (fuck you micron BTW), they are going all in and having a shit storm in PR on the consumer side. If they are taking these risks without proper assurances, then they are utterly deranged
I’m not sure there’s a way to have proper assurances for such vast sums of silicon and money. You’re going with the flow of the speculation at that point. If it pops, their best hope is for bailouts to save them (not unrealistic, but their interlocutors will then be governments, not corporations).
You do have a good point that at a certain point it is not possible to have assurances as in values. However, there are other assurances that can be even more important, such as, contractual ones. If they do not have the proper assurances at that level too up to a certain point, then everyone is highly blindsided on the c suite.
But my biggest point has to do with burning a massive bridge, the consumers, and take a dive into this nonsense.
Promises of buying only work if the buyer still exists at the time you produce the goods.
Besides, I’m pretty sure that the main buyers type on the consumer side are PC and phone makers. So they could go back there almost unharmed.
I mean, you and I can’t, but memory manufacturers? They’ll find a way.
This has happened before with LCD panels. I remember my mother’s work laptop had a 1900x1200 panel (back when they were still 4:3 aspect ratio). It was a mid-tier ThinkPad, not cheap but not crazy expensive.
A few years later, panel makers started pushing widescreen formats and user friendly language to “help us understand and make informed choices” like HD and FHD.
The resolution of HD? 1280x720.
High-definition was already a concept, but the idea of calling panels that were a huge step back in resolution “high-def” was exactly how they managed to extract more from consumers for less.
I’m sure they’ll find a way to mislead people into buying overly expensive RAM they don’t actually need.
“You totally need ECC for your HTPC bro, wouldn’t want cosmic rays to mess with your movies!”