AI Data Centers Are Making RAM Crushingly Expensive, Which Is Going to Skyrocket the Cost of Laptops, Tablets, and Gaming PCs

Budget-wise, there have certainly been better times to be a PC gamer in search of higher framerates.

For the past few months, RAM prices have been shooting through the roof, as the rapid buildout of AI datacenters causes an ever tightening shortage of memory chips. What was once considered to be one of the most affordable components of building a gaming rig has now doubled or even tripled in price. Prices are so volatile, in fact, that some retailers are now selling RAM kits at market prices that go up and down — or usually up and up — by the day, instead of having a fixed price tag. Or as The Verge put it: they’re being sold “like lobster.”

And now, a new omen is casting a somehow even more ominous shadow over the future to come.

On Wednesday, the computer hardware company Micron announced that it was ending its “Crucial” line of consumer RAM kits and solid-state drives (SSD), and will instead “improve supply and support” for its “larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” it said in an announcement.

Those “larger, strategic customers,” of course, are AI companies. In effect, the US manufacturer is ditching gamers for good to cash in on the LLM hype train.

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief business officer at Micron, said in the announcement.

The Crucial brand has been a staple of affordable PC gaming for nearly three decades, and its death is being seen as a canary in a coal mine. It won’t just be gamers who are affected, either: pricier RAM means pricier laptops, tablets, and even smartphones for everyone. RAM prices have already surged by 171 percent year-over-year on average, with many products seeing even worse price hikes. The pre-built PC company CyberPowerPC warned last month that surging RAM prices have “had a direct impact on the cost of building gaming PCs” that are forcing it to raise prices.

Micron is considered to be one of the three major memory chip manufacturers, along with the South Korean conglomerates Samsung and SK Hynix. As of this year’s second quarter, it boasted an almost 25 percent market share of DRAM production, which is what forms the RAM used in consumer computers. 

Now all of it will practically be vanishing from the shelves. That’s because DRAM is also used to create what’s known as high bandwidth memory, or HBH, which data centers need to quickly process the vast amounts of data used to train AI models. Perhaps trillions of dollars are expected to be spent building more and more data centers over the coming years. ChatGPT maker OpenAI’s astronomical Stargate project to expand its data center empire is projected to cost $500 billion on its own.

As part of that project, OpenAI reportedly signed an agreement with Samsung and SK Hynix to buy up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month, which would be close to nearly 40 percent of all DRAM production on the planet.

All that’s to say is that don’t expect RAM to become cheap again anytime soon. The death of Crucial epitomizes how the tech industry’s single-minded obsession with pushing AI tech — which many consumers have no interest in — is making casualties out of beloved products left and right.

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