Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
Budget-wise, there’s definitely a better time to be a PC gamer looking for higher framerates.
Over the past few months, RAM prices have been skyrocketing, as the rapid construction of AI datacenters is leading to a persistent shortage of memory chips. What was once considered one of the most affordable components in building a gaming rig has now doubled or tripled in price. Prices are so volatile, in fact, that some retailers are now selling RAM kits at market prices that fluctuate from day to day – or usually up and up – rather than at a fixed price tag. or the like The Verge keep it: They are being sold “like lobsters”.
And now, a new omen casts an even more ominous shadow over the coming future.
On Wednesday, computer hardware company Micron announced that it is ending its “critical” line of consumer RAM kits and solid-state drives (SSDs), and instead will “improve supply and support” for “large, strategic customers in fast-growing regions.”
Those “large, strategic customers”, of course, are AI companies. In fact, the American manufacturer is leaving gamers to cash in on the LLM hype train.
“AI-driven growth in the data center is driving increased demand for memory and storage,” Sumit Sadana, Micron’s executive vice president and chief business officer, said in the announcement.
The Crucial brand has been a staple of affordable PC gaming for nearly three decades, and its demise is being viewed as the canary in the coal mine. This won’t just affect gamers: expensive RAM means expensive laptops, tablets, and even smartphones for everyone. RAM prices are already 171 percent increase year-on-year On average, many products are seeing even worse price increases. Pre-built PC company CyberPowerPC caution Last month it said rising RAM prices “have had a direct impact on the cost of manufacturing gaming PCs” forcing it to raise prices.
Micron is considered one of the three major memory chip manufacturers along with South Korean conglomerate Samsung and SK Hynix. In form of second quarter of this yearIt claimed about 25 percent market share in DRAM production, producing the RAM used in consumer computers.
Now all this will practically disappear from the shelves. This is because DRAM is also used to create high bandwidth memory, or HBH, which data centers need to quickly process the vast amounts of data used to train AI models. Perhaps Expected to cost trillions of dollars Building more and more data centers in the coming years. ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s Astronomy Stargate project to expand its data center empire Its cost is estimated to be $500 billion.
As part of that project, OpenAI reportedly signed a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix to buy 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, which will be close to About 40 percent of all DRAM production on the planet,
That said, don’t expect RAM to become affordable again any time soon. Crucial’s death is emblematic of how the tech industry’s single-minded obsession with advancing AI technology — in which many consumers have no interest — is causing casualties to beloved products left and right.
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