TECH NEWS – In the summer of 2024, he delivered a speech at Computex that no one took seriously at the time. Today, however, things are different.
At the event, PC Gamer had the opportunity to sit down with Micron representatives and discuss DRAM and SSDs. Although we hardly noticed it at the time, the representatives clearly indicated that a memory price crisis was approaching. Micron‘s vice president, Dinesh Bahal, was very clear when discussing the memory consumption of the AI industry. Micron warned us that things were about to take a turn for the worse. Even as DRAM prices began to rise rapidly, the dire prediction remained dormant in our memories.
There is probably a deep, complex, scientific reason why this happened, but it may be due to Micron‘s barely concealed delight that AI would consume all the DRAM. Compared to video cards, RAM modules have arguably never been as attractive, but they have always been important. From Micron‘s perspective, however, RAM modules ranked third in terms of demand, after GPUs and CPUs. The situation is different now, of course, as AI’s insatiable memory needs affect the entire electronics market.
“This is called high-bandwidth memory. The big three—SK Hynix, us, and Samsung—are investing significant time and resources into developing HBM products and bringing them to market. This investment will impact the supply and demand balance, which may not affect your readers in the short term, i.e., there won’t be any immediate pricing issues. However, we believe this will continue to be the case over the next few years, as it has been for the past 9 or 10 months.
Many consumers are experiencing sticker shock because RAM prices have always gone down. NAND prices have always gone down. I could buy a terabyte for $50. Now it’s 80 dollars. What’s going on?” I just wanted to mention that we’re really excited because memory becomes core to AI, as opposed to sitting at the edge of it. Memory was kind of an afterthought, like, “Yeah, there’s memory.” But now, without memory, it won’t happen. Right? I think there’s a big change happening, and memory has become sexy again,” Bahal said.
If he had known how bad things would turn out, his comments would have sounded more serious. But even if that had been the case, would we have paid attention to such dire warnings? History suggests not.
Source: PCGamer
