Phones, laptops and consoles get costlier over memory price hike; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to gadget buyers: Having DRAM in your devices is ‘quite terrible’ for the world’s limited supply

Buying a new phone, laptop or gaming console has got noticeably costlier this year, and the reason sits inside the device. Memory chips, the DRAM and storage every gadget relies on, have climbed so steeply that brands across categories have passed the cost on to buyers. Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose AI data centres compete for the same chips, has said that keeping this memory in personal devices is a poor use of a scarce resource.

Speaking on Cheeky Pint, the podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, which went live on October 29, Altman pushed back on the idea that running open-source AI models on personal computers would take the load off data centres.