Asked about supply chain shortages, including the ongoing RAM shortage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said it’s “terrible” to have memory sitting in personal computers when it could be in data centers. He made the remarks during an appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he also talked about the impact of AI on math.
Will running AI locally ease the RAM shortage?
Altman pushed back on the idea that local AI will ease the crunch. Many people want to run AI on their own machines, he said, and many assume that open-source models will let them do that and make the big data centers unnecessary. He doesn’t see it that way.
Why does Sam Altman think RAM belongs in data centers?
“From a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time,” he said.
“You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment,” Altman added. “And somehow everyone’s— many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
It’s not clear whether Altman had gaming PCs in mind or developer machines like the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box or the new touchscreen MacBook Pro. The practical result, according to the report, is the same either way. Every chip sitting idle in a home or office is memory that cannot serve the cloud.
The supply picture is already tight. Memory makers Samsung and SK Hynix have long-term deals with cloud service operators. Projects like OpenAI’s Stargate have reserved much of the world’s RAM output over the next few years.
Why are laptops and phones getting more expensive?
That demand is showing up in what consumers pay. The billions memory makers are willing to lay out for chips is a major reason laptops, phones and other tech are getting more expensive right now.
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