RAM Prices Didn’t Just Rise, They Practically Teleported
If you’ve tried buying RAM, SSDs, or even a new laptop recently and wondered why the price suddenly looks like it was calculated in gold bars instead of dollars, here’s your answer:
AI companies are buying memory chips faster than manufacturers can make them.
DRAM, NAND, HBM, you name it - data centers are inhaling these components like oxygen. Micron even announced it’s ditching the consumer market entirely so it can focus on feeding the AI beast. Let that sink in:
A major memory supplier just publicly said “humans can wait.”
This isn’t sci fi. This is the real, boring, economic impact of AI.
GPUs? Say goodbye to affordable ones
Remember when GPUs were expensive because of crypto miners?
Cute times.
Today’s shortage makes that era look like a clearance sale. Nvidia and AMD are funneling nearly all their chips straight to hyperscalers. Public markets barely get leftovers. If you walk into a store and find a reasonably priced graphics card, treat it with reverence. It’s basically an endangered species.
Even your phone and laptop are getting caught in the blast radius
When memory becomes scarce and expensive, manufacturers have two choices:
Make devices more expensive.
Quietly downgrade specs and hope you don’t notice.
Neither choice is great, which means consumers are going to feel the ripple effects whether they care about AI or not.
So is AI ruining tech?
No.
But it is rearranging the furniture so aggressively that everything fragile is falling off the shelves.
And here’s the key part that gets lost in all the panic:
This happens every time a world changing technology arrives too fast.
The dot com boom did this.
Smartphones did this.
Crypto did this.
Every “next big thing” creates a short term mess before the long term reality settles into place.
There are real silver linings
The chaos we’re experiencing has an upside.
Huge investments mean huge advancements.
The tech moves faster when every company rushes to outdo the others.
Chip shortages force new manufacturing capacity.
More fabs, more supply, more innovation long term.
Competition is fierce, which means better tools for everyone.
Even the people who claim to hate AI will eventually benefit from what comes out of this period.
The bubble bursting will clean up the hype.
We’ll finally see what AI is actually good for, and what was just venture capital theater.
The key is staying level headed.
Not panicking.
Not cheering for collapse.
Not declaring that every new chip factory is a step toward Skynet.
This is what it looks like when a new industrial revolution arrives faster than the world can organize itself.
It’s messy.
It’s expensive.
It’s disruptive.
And eventually, it will settle.
