Neural Dispatch: Stressful times for Nvidia’s world view, and AI refuses to take responsibility

Cognitive warmup. RAM prices are going up, and this will not be pretty. Mark my words. The fact that a 96GB DDR5 RAM costs as much as $900 (around ₹89,000) means it is more expensive than an entire Sony PlayStation 5 (that’s around ₹54,990). These are memory prices that haven’t doubled, but tripled over the past few months. The main culprit? AI’s insatiable appetite for memory. Data centres and cloud providers are buying up massive amounts of high-bandwidth memory for AI servers. Consumer RAM business naturally takes a backseat — that means your next smartphone, desktop, laptop, even your next tablet or gaming console, will get a bit more expensive. And I’m not overstating the scenario. There is another element at play. The transition from DDR4 to DDR5 (the first DDR5 products began arriving in 2022) did add complexity, and initial production of newer nodes understandably had lower yields, constraining supply during this crossover period between 2021 and 2023. Memory brands including Micron, Crucial, Patriot, and Corsair were playing inventory catch-up.