AI-fueled DRAM shortage hits CES 2026 smart devices

The CES floor now has a weird split personality: glossy AI‑powered gadgets out front, and behind the scenes, vendors quietly panicking over DRAM allocation. The Mathrubhumi piece makes clear that AI’s appetite for memory has spilled out of data centers and into everything from laptops to smart rings, putting sustained upward pressure on DRAM prices and forcing trade‑offs between capability, cost and battery life. In effect, we’re seeing a replay of the GPU crunch, but for a component that touches virtually every computing device.

For the race to AGI, this matters because memory constraints can become a real bottleneck on deploying large models at the edge and in low‑margin devices. If DRAM stays scarce and expensive, OEMs may favor smaller, distilled models and more efficient architectures, accelerating research into sparsity, quantization and retrieval‑augmented setups. It also underscores how fragile the hardware stack is: a big model breakthrough is meaningless if you can’t afford to ship enough RAM in the products that users actually touch. Expect more vertical integration and long‑term supply deals between AI labs, chipmakers, and device brands as everyone tries to secure their slice of the memory pool.