Gaming: Because Of AI 'memory's Become Sexy Again'. That's What Micron Told...

In the summer of 2024, at the annual Computex event, we were treated to all kinds of new PC hardware, from outlandish coolers, funky new memory sticks, and ear-splitting robots. We also got the chance to sit down with Micron and chat about all things DRAM and SSD, and even though it barely registered at the time, we were told in no uncertain terms that a memory pricing crisis was on its way.

It wasn't couched in hedge-betting, weasel words, or any other roundabout way of masking the truth. Micron's vice president, Dinesh Bahal, set the table as clear as it could have possibly been when discussing the AI industry's rampant consumption of memory.

"This thing called high bandwidth memory. Okay? The reason I'm bringing that up is all three of us, the big three—Hynix, us, Samsung—all three of us are spending a lot of energy and effort towards building HBM products towards getting those out into the market," he began.

"That investment is really going to impact the supply-demand balance, which may not impact your readers in the short term in terms of 'hey, there's pricing issues, etc'. But that is really what we believe is going to continue to happen over the course of the next few years, which has already been happening over the last nine or 10 months."

I could stop there because those statements alone are all the evidence you need to see that Micron was signalling that trouble was on its way. Bahal went even further, though, putting into numbers that anyone could understand.

Without memory, it ain't gonna happen. Right? So I think there's this real big change and, you know, I'm going to use the phrase, memory's become sexy again.

"A bunch of consumers are in a sticker shock kind of environment of 'Hey, RAM prices have always gone down. NAND prices have always gone down. I could buy a terabyte for 50 bucks. That terabyte is now 80 bucks, what's going on?'"

Okay, so $80 for a 1 TB SSD was very much a last year kind of thing, because you're now looking at over $100 for a cheap gaming SSD. But the actual size of the price hike is almost irrelevant, because what matters here is that Micron was warning us that things were about to head south to our faces. We reported on this immediately and then, like everyone else, we forgot about it.

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Even as DRAM prices were starting to rapidly rise, the doom-laden prophecy lay dormant in our memories. There's probably some

Source: PC Gamer