Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the memory chips. Otherwise, the RAM harvesters would get them. Elsewhere, criminal groups are misdirecting trucks carrying RAM in order to loot them. All of this is happening because of a generational shortage of a part used in practically every electronic gadget on Earth.
RAM is your device’s short-term memory—storing the information it needs to handle any active tasks. (RAM stands for “random-access memory.”) To put this in intimately familiar terms, it is what your computer runs out of when you have too many browser tabs open. And right now, the price of RAM is skyrocketing. From September to February, the price of a single 64GB stick of RAM went from roughly $250 to more than $1,000.
Gamers who build their own juiced computers were among the first to notice that something was off. Starting in the fall, it became so difficult for them to acquire memory sticks that they have given a name to this crisis: RAMageddon. Now it’s quickly becoming everyone’s problem. In December, Dell jacked the prices of some of its computers by hundreds of dollars because of what its COO has referred to as “this memory crisis, shortage, whatever you want to call it.” Earlier this month, for the same reason, Lenovo raised prices on some of its products, including the popular ThinkPad.
This seems to be only the beginning. Matteo Rinaldi, the head of a global semiconductor-research institute run by Northeastern University, told me he recently asked a colleague what new laptop he should buy. “He told me right away, ‘Well, you know, it almost doesn’t matter which one,’” Rinaldi said. “‘Just decide you want to buy now, because prices are going up.’”
RAM is suddenly so expensive because memory is powering the AI boom. Data centers require huge amounts to run the models that underlie AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude—especially as they become capable of handling more complicated tasks. This year, a group of tech giants—Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle—is set to collectively spend half a trillion dollars on the AI build-out. Roughly a third of that money is being spent on memory alone, according to Dylan Patel, the founder of SemiAnalysis, a popular semiconductor-research firm.
[Read: Welcome to a multidimensional economic disaster]
The insatiable demand has “cannibalized our conventional consumer-electronics supply,” Yang Wang, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, a market-research firm, told me. Every major RAM manufacturer has shifted production lines to service AI data centers. This year, 70 percent of memory-chip products made globally will be destined for them. In South Korea, where two of the biggest RAM manufacturers are based, Silicon Valley executives are reportedly booking hotels in the country’s tech districts, frantically hoping to secure inventory. A Korean newspaper has given them a name: RAM beggars.
Ideally, this problem would be solved by producing a whole lot more RAM. Micron, one of the biggest RAM manufacturers, is building a factory in New York that will cost more than any other private investment in the state’s history. Elon Musk recently suggested that Tesla will build its own RAM factories, called “fabs,” to ensure that he has enough memory to build robots and robotaxis. (“We’ve got two choices: Hit the chip wall, or make a fab,” he said in January.) But because of the complexity of making RAM, it could take even the richest man in the world two to five years to bring a new factory online. In the meantime, the world simply won’t have enough of a basic electronics part.
During RAMageddon, your gadgets will essentially be subject to an AI tax. It’s long been safe to assume that technology will get cheaper, faster, and better. But for the next few years, all signs suggest that devices will get more expensive, slower, and worse.
So far, it might not feel like all that much has changed. Earlier this month, Apple released its cheapest computer ever, the $599 Mac Neo. (It runs on a chip previously used only in iPhones.) But elsewhere, the price hikes have started. Samsung’s new Galaxy phones cost about $100 more than last year’s models, which the company’s COO has attributed in large part to the memory shortage. That’s despite the fact that Samsung is one of three companies in the world producing a significant amount of memory. Android phones have debuted this year with worse cameras, less storage, and slower processors than models released years ago, Wang told me, yet they still cost more.
Expect more changes like this. Gadget makers were able to initially swallow the cost of high RAM, but in the long run, they’ll have little choice but to pass on the cost to consumers. Consider Sony, which just announced that it will raise the price of the PlayStation 5 by $100. Before the adjustment, the memory chips inside a PS5 were worth more than the console itself. Smaller video-game manufacturers have pushed back launches or canceled the release of new consoles altogether.
To keep up with increasing RAM costs, things might get weird. Companies may jack up software prices to compensate for all the money they are sinking into memory chips. Sony’s CFO said on a recent earnings call that the company will survive the RAM crisis by “monetizing the installed base,” which seems to be a euphemism for finding ways to charge PlayStation owners more, or showing them more ads. (Sony did not respond to a request for comment.) At the same time, some companies may start to pare back products they’ve made “smart” to justify markups. Smart speakers, smart toilets, smart toasters, and smart deodorants (yes, really) all contain RAM. “Do we stop getting smart refrigerators? I don’t think that’s a net bad,” Laine Nooney, a technology historian at NYU, told me.
[Read: Your smart thermostat isn’t here to help you]
If that’s a silver lining, it’s not a particularly good one. TrendForce, a consumer-research firm, anticipates that laptop prices will rise by more than a third in the next few years. Computers under $500 will be extinct by 2028, according to a report from Gartner. Put differently, cheaper computers may fall off the map. “The $300 Chromebook and the $150 Android phone were products of a specific era—one where memory was cheap because nobody else was competing for it at this scale,” Nate Jones, an AI analyst, told me. “That era is ending.”
The consequences are global. All of this will be felt acutely in poor countries, where sub-$150 smartphones are especially popular. Some people may have no choice but to revert to flip phones, potentially cutting them off from essential apps and services. “You can’t build a gaming PC? Cool story, bro,” Wang, the smartphone analyst, said. “But then people in Africa can’t get a device which is crucial for their lives.”
So much money is going into the AI build-out that it is already reshaping the physical world. The data centers that are sprouting up across the United States are at least partly to blame for rising utility bills. And now people who may never have heard of Claude or asked ChatGPT for homework help will feel the effects of RAMmaggedon. Hospitals have shelved plans to install touch screens that display medical charts and let patients order food, because the displays contain RAM, Rachael England, a manager at Vizient, a consulting firm that works with many U.S. hospitals, told me. Josh Bauman, the director of technology for a public-school district in Missouri, told me that if RAM prices keep increasing, his district may rethink buying a Chromebook for every student. For the foreseeable future, no one can escape the AI tax.
The post You Can’t Escape the AI Tax appeared first on The Atlantic.
