8 GB ought to be enough for anybody

The world is going through a memory shortage. Not the kind in our brains (though that may be true too), but the memory inside our computers and phones. Blame the AI companies. “Them again!” you might be thinking. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and co. are buying up as much of the world’s memory output as they can get their hands on to feed their data centers. Very little is left, and that little — as is typical of the savagery of unregulated capitalism — is sold for its weight in gold. Memory limits and artificial scarcity are nothing new. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, is credited with saying, back in 1981, that “640 KB [of memory] ought to be enough for anybody.” (He denies it.) This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman kept alive the proud tradition of bizarre statements from tech leaders by saying, on a podcast: But 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…

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