AI boom drives RAM shortage and device price hikes, warns OPB

This story is a concrete reminder that the race to ever‑larger AI models is now constrained as much by memory as by compute. OPB’s reporting, drawing on TrendForce data and Micron’s commentary, paints a picture where DRAM prices have jumped roughly 50% in a single quarter and are expected to rise another 40%, with AI data centers soaking up capacity that used to serve consumer electronics. That’s not a short‑term blip; analysts expect existing fabs to max out by 2026, with the next big Micron plant not online until 2027. ([opb.org](https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/28/as-ai-gobbles-up-memory-chips-prices-for-devices-may-rise/))

Strategically, this creates a feedback loop in the AGI race. Frontier labs and cloud providers can afford to outbid everyone else for high‑end memory, which entrenches their lead but also inflates the capital costs of training and inference. Smaller AI companies—and any non‑AI workload that depends on large RAM footprints—will feel the squeeze first. Over time this could accelerate work on memory‑efficient architectures (like Groq‑style SRAM approaches), model compression, and algorithmic efficiency, because simply throwing more DRAM at the problem is getting expensive. ([opb.org](https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/28/as-ai-gobbles-up-memory-chips-prices-for-devices-may-rise/))

For the broader ecosystem, sustained memory inflation acts like a hidden tax on digital infrastructure. It may slow the diffusion of powerful models to edge devices and emerging markets, even as hyperscalers keep scaling up in their own data centers.