OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks it’s “terrible” for people to have RAM in their computers rather than in a data center, as the scarcity of memory caused by the AI boom continues to drive up costs.
In an interview with YouTuber Cheeky Pint, Altman talked about the global compute supply problems facing the AI industry right now. And, when the conversation inevitably moved on to memory, Altman claimed that the “invisible hand” (of the market) is failing, likely because every DRAM wafer isn’t flowing straight into a data center to run these AI models.
Altman said: “From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
It kind of makes sense from Altman’s perspective. It’s in OpenAI’s best interest to get as many hyperscaler data centers online to make its huge AI models as fast as possible. But, while Altman seems to believe that everyone is buying memory just to run local AI models, RAM is needed for nearly every kind of consumer electronics product, which is why every piece of gaming hardware has risen in price this year.
Just this month, used PS5 Pros skyrocketed in price to $1,399, after the console got an official price increase in March due to the RAM shortage. Meanwhile, the RTX 5080 just disappeared off of Nvidia’s marketplace, weeks after the RTX 5090 was all but discontinued.
For Altman, though, who believes cloud-based AI models are the future of computing, it’s likely he sees all of these consumer shortages as a way to ensure that more memory gets funneled to AI companies to stuff it into data centers. And, according to Samsung’s latest earnings call, that’s exactly what’s happening, and is why the RAM situation isn’t going to get any better next year.
Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images.
