- Micron’s CEO has been talking about the gravity of the RAM supply situation
- Sanjay Mehrotra said that ‘AI is in very early innings’ and that AI will need a lot more memory to ‘scale up’ going forward
- This follows similar warnings from the other two big memory chip makers
We’ve had another warning from a major memory chipmaker that the RAM crisis will only worsen, and rumors continue to circulate that Nvidia could bring back an old GPU – from two generations ago – to help deal with video RAM woes.
Wccftech reports that Micron just posted record Q2 revenue, fuelled by AI demand, and the company’s CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, observed that this demand isn’t going away – and in fact will only get stronger.
In an interview, Mehrotra told CNBC that: “AI is in very early innings; you just saw at GTC how much advances are being made in AI. And memory is a strategic asset; you need more memory, you need faster performance memory in order for AI to be able to deliver its full capabilities.”
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“This is inference inflection. As inference broadens, it will scale up the need for tokens, and those tokens need to be fast, and guess what, you need more memory, you need faster memory in order to deliver the full potential of memory.”
“And memory today is very tight supply, and supply cannot be brought up that easily, and you are seeing that in our results.”
Meanwhile, as VideoCardz recently pointed out, there are continued rumors that the RTX 3060 is going to be resurrected in its 12GB incarnation. This is according to the Board Channels, a source of supply chain rumors over in China, and we’re told production of the RTX 3060 could be fired up in June.
Add some seasoning with this one for sure, but assuming it’s genuine, why might this happen? It is, in theory, a move to provide some relief and additional choice, with more wallet-friendly Nvidia GPUs.
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It’s very much a reflection of the situation with video RAM, and while 12GB is a considerable loadout for a budget graphics card, it’s GDDR6 memory rather than the current generation, which uses GDDR7. Therefore, it won’t interfere with the inventory of the latter.
Even though the RTX 3060 is an old GPU, the 12GB configuration will be tempting for some gamers looking for a cheaper card with more video memory.
Analysis: a trio of ominous warnings
(Image credit: Micron)
The key comment from the Micron CEO is that AI is in its “very early innings”, and that we can expect AI to gobble up more memory, with the suggestion being that it might be a lot more.
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What’s also worrying is that Micron isn’t saying this in isolation. In fact, both the other major players in terms of RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix, have issued similar (or more dire) warnings of their own.
Samsung recently said that it expects “significant shortages” across its memory products to last through to 2028 (at least), and SK Hynix previously warned that we could be dealing with the fallout from the RAM crisis until as late as 2030.
With all three memory-making giants issuing these kinds of ominous statements, and the likes of Nvidia rumored to be resurrecting old GPUs to get around video RAM supply constraints, the prospect of the RAM crisis easing off any time soon doesn’t seem likely.
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