The “memory shortage” that no one saw coming

As a follow-up to my last post, “The AI Experts Who Couldn’t Predict AI,” I want to expound on the “memory shortage” of 2025-2026 and how no one saw it coming, even experts in AI. A seemingly sudden demand for memory due to AI has led to shortages for personal computers and other applications. This has garnered widespread media attention, including even a Wikipedia article, “2025–present global memory supply shortage.” Same for considerable discussion on Reddit, with new threads being posted daily, such as from annoyed gamers who now find memory in short supply: Search interest also swelled in 2025, according to Google Trends for “memory shortage:” Memory stocks such as SanDisk, Micron, and Seagate, which had been lagging Nvidia stock from 2022-2025, suddenly rocketed, all while Nvidia stock did nothing: My question is, how did everyone miss this? From 2022-2024 there was all this demand for GPUs to train the models. The bottleneck was computing power, not storage, and it was assumed…