Micron Says Memory Shortage Will 'Persist' Beyond 2026 (theverge.com) 47
Micron, one of the world's three largest memory suppliers, expects the global shortage of DRAM and NAND flash memory to "persist through and beyond" 2026 as AI-driven demand continues to outstrip supply. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra made the forecast during the company's latest earnings call on Wednesday, saying that "supply will remain substantially short of the demand for the foreseeable future." The company posted record quarterly revenue of $13.64 billion, up from $8.71 billion in the same period last year.
Micron recently shuttered Crucial, its consumer-facing brand, to focus on high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers. HBM technology requires three times the silicon wafers of standard DRAM, leaving fewer resources for the chips that go into PCs, smartphones and cars. Micron plans to boost DRAM and NAND shipments by 20 percent next year but acknowledged this won't meet demand. New facilities in Idaho and New York are slated for 2027 and 2030 respectively.
Micron recently shuttered Crucial, its consumer-facing brand, to focus on high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers. HBM technology requires three times the silicon wafers of standard DRAM, leaving fewer resources for the chips that go into PCs, smartphones and cars. Micron plans to boost DRAM and NAND shipments by 20 percent next year but acknowledged this won't meet demand. New facilities in Idaho and New York are slated for 2027 and 2030 respectively.
Re: The times of "AI" resource misallocation are h (Score:3)
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Re:Is Windows 11 the cause of this? (Score:5, Informative)
The memory requirements for Windows 11 are absurd. Linux works fine with 4GB of RAM.
It's time for businesses and government to give up on Microsoft.
You didn't even read the summary. It's due to AI datacenters. "Micron recently shuttered Crucial, its consumer-facing brand, to focus on high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers."
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Linux can run with 16 Mb of ram on console more or less.
And even a graphic system with just 128 Mbytes of RAM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
It's a Javascript browser who raises the memory demand to GB to work nice. Current programs also has scaled and assumed similar quantities of RAM.
For a similar reason, if we push to have local AI capabilities, we can push the requirements to 64 or 128 GB of RAM easily.
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Quite the opposite, it is the crazy rush after the illusion of "AI growth" that is the problem.
Expect that consumer hardware will stagnate, as the "AI" vendors who must sell the LLMs, try to set things up so you must offload whatever it is you want done to their servers and pay for it, even if it means buying up hardware production capacity.
Re: Is Windows 11 the cause of this? (Score:3)
Linux works fine with 4GB but apps don't. I know because my laptop came with 4GB and it was borderline unusable of I actually did anything with it. 8GB made it acceptable.
Meanwhile my desktop has 64GB of DDR4 and I'm real glad I bought it when I did. Most people don't need that much, but I do VMs sometimes and it's important. OTOH gaming showed significant improvements going from 16 to 32.
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There are apps and there are apps. Slack can OOM with mere 128GB, it worked stable on 256GB though. On the other hand, there are playable and fun 4K games.
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Windows isn't the reason for an OS to feel sluggish. Linux would run like absolute dogshit on 4GB if you were to run Teams on it. Heck I disagree with your premise, Linux runs like dogshit on 4GB with a significant browser heavy workload as it is.
Applications chew through RAM. The OS is quite insignificant.
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Linux is running fine with 4GB of RAM if all you do is terminal based, try to run a modern GUI app (Firefox, LibreOffice, Gimp) on a modern desktop (GNOME, KDE, Cosmic) and you will find yourself needing about the same amount of RAM.
Then I won't buy. (Score:2)
My wallet will stay closed to memory purchases for the duration of this price spike.
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My wallet will stay closed to memory purchases for the duration of this price spike.
Price spike? You have to pretend to be an AI datacenter to even be eligible to purchase memory from Micron. Which, I assume, will require a purchase well beyond what any individual could ever reasonably need, unless you happen to actually own your own large-scale datacenter.
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I think that pretty much all memory modules have spiked. I just checked Kingston (consumer) DDR4 16 GB memory module, which price has gone from 42 euros to 131 euros within 6 months. Kingston buys DRAM chips from Micron, SK Hynix, Powerchip, Nanya and others.
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Consumer DDR5 prices have tripled to quadrupled in the last 6 months.
I bought my daughter a PC in january, and I am building one for myself now.
In AUD the exact same 2x16GB DDR5 6000mT/s CL30 ram from the exact same store has gone from $182 to $699. Most of that increase has happened the last 8 weeks since these contracts were signed.
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That's what they want.
They want you to not buy anything going forward.
MRAM as a possible future. (Score:1)
Be nice if MRAM was more mature especially OHE.
As a once loyal Crucial customer. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It doesn't matter where your money is. When this bubble bursts, it will take down the rest of the economy with it.
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Yes if it gets so bad the value of your number in the bank is gone - some of you doomsayers will be right. I guess you'll be happy to be right up until that same fate falls on you.
I only code as a hobby, and see all IT jobs as overpaid. But if it's your entire means of survival uh-oh.
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You know what they say about assuming...
The why are you assuming anyone knows "what they say"?
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Capitalism means they sell it at a lower price than expected.
But that also assumes the AI bubble bursts affects all computing. There is the likely possibility that as the AI bubble bursts because it is replaced with an entirely different computing style. In which case, chips will become even more valuable. Among other things, if the military decides they really need more drones, they could easily take all the memory.
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It's happened so many times the memory makers aren't making more memory. They just shift the memory they make without increasing capacity. They kept getting burned the last few times when there was a huge demand, they make more, then demand vanishes and they're stuck with a surplus. So they're not making more, they just going to let prices rise and pocket the profits. When demand
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I get it, RAM producers are always playing catch up - but abandoning an entire market is not playing catch up it is throwing them under the bus on the way to the bank.
Thanks AI'ssholes (Score:4, Informative)
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you should have salary that can handle that.
His salary is irrelevant, he is billing that to you. The cost of business is passed on to the customer. I doubt the OP is sitting there running CFDs just for their own shits and giggles on the weekend.
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It is being done properly. We're just doing more complex shapes *properly* now than the horrendously inaccurate abstractions from the days where this kind of shit may have been done in Fortran.
Welcome to the modern world. But I get it man, I look around and too wish I was back in the 90s.
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The only wage inflation is happening at the executive level. The rest of us see 2-3% raises while inflation has increased prices a lot more than that.
In a gold rush.... (Score:2)
Better to sell the shovels than to try to pick the winners of the prospecting war.
Best,
Translation (Score:2)
Shovels and donkeys ... (Score:2)
As usual, in a gold rush, it is the guys selling shovels and donkeys that make the money ...
In the current AI rush, it is the GPU and RAM manufacturers ...
All the while... (Score:2)
All the while, "stockpiling" in the "new" data center in the desert of Idaho, Utah so the top managers can get more profit, and bigger performance bonuses. The new golden age of economics in America. And ignoring the "code bloat" of apps, OSes....its a conspiracy I tell you...whoops forgot my tinfoil hat...
JoshK.