If you care about memory, PC gaming, or technology in general, there's a good chance you've heard of a little 'ol thing called the memory crisis. Thanks to AI gobbling up all the resources, it's the reason why RAM has quadrupled in price recently (if you're lucky). Some big companies may be able to weather that storm by steering into the skid (like Asus, which is betting somewhat on AI) or by having reserves of memory and strong contracts with suppliers. Others seem to be struggling with the day-to-day and are making compromises to navigate.
Jese Martinez, the founder of custom PC company PowerGPU, tells me this crisis is very different to the one that hit GPUs five years ago. When demand for the RTX 20/30 series was already high, cryptominers were buying batches of cards to mine for Ethereum. This led to a surge in pricing, but it was a fairly contained crisis, with it only briefly threatening storage drives and CPUs but never taking hold.
