Memory Bankruptcy; the curse of corpo preorders and our willing descent into oblivion

“Hey sorry I forgot this task, it slipped from my mind,” a perfectly normal occurrence in day-to-day life but when your computer forgets a piece of information then it becomes a DEFCON 1 situation. Your computer also has the same sort of architecture your brain uses. A signal is received, your brain searches for instructions and stores some information vital for the time being as temporary memory, then a response where you perform an action and maybe you store the action in your doubtful permanent memory. Computers work the same where some memory is volatile, as in it is lost when power is switched off, and some is non-volatile, remains even after power loss. Non-volatile memory is your solid-state drives (SSD), hard disk drives (HDD), CDs, pen drives, and SD cards. Volatile memory mostly consists of Random Access Memory (RAM). RAM is your temporary memory that is used during the process and forgotten afterward. For the purposes of this article there is no need to go into detailed working because if I knew I would be a software engineer.

Figure 1: SSD and Ram, above and below respectively

(Reference: above: PC Studio below: Computer Fandom)

Volatile and non-volatile memory work hand in hand to perform a task, removing one is like removing your intestines from your digestive tract. They used to be the more cost-effective components while building a computer. Notice how I said “used to.” Their prices have been skyrocketing since December 2025, and they will keep increasing since big tech companies are continuously ordering more memory for their dear old and new data centers. Memory manufacturing companies like Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, and other giants are completely booked on orders. The demand is so huge that the biggest producer of memory, Micron has completely jumped ship from consumer devices and has now shifted completely into AI memory production.

These problems may seem like big companies playing big games with each other but always remember that in these large scale battles the ones who suffer the most are the common people. When these big companies all buy up such crucial devices there won’t be much left for your daily devices, the biggest suffering point being mobile phones. You will pay top dollar for an inferior product because a big company like OpenAI or Alphabet Inc. has bought all the stock for their little baby AI. AI runs in data centers and the data is sent to you through online services. You do not produce the data, instead you willingly feed it more. To ensure you have the best experience, ISP providers are increasing speeds and costs, so that you do not notice your device becoming worse and worse with every passing update. How soon do you think it will be when we have amazing internet but bad devices, so you will have to stream something like Excel on your device. The day will come when you will own nothing and be happy, subscriptions will be your way of life.

Figure 2: RAM price increase graph.

(Reference: PCGamesN)

The demand is so high that memory manufacturers are reportedly booked till 2029. To break this down clearly, companies have placed orders for devices that have not been manufactured for data centers that have not been built. Already the amount of water for cooling and the amount of energy to run these data centers are reaching unsustainable levels, with households near them reporting a higher electricity usage cost which will continue to surge (Reference: Bloomberg). Consumer devices are already shifting to lower memory devices for their phones. Recently low budget companies like Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo, and others have already started shifting to lower the amount of RAM in phones, directly making your phone more sluggish and slow while keeping the same  apocalyptic price tag (Reference: Reuters).

The only two companies set to make a profit are Apple and Samsung. A duopoly is not what consumers need. Nvidia and AMD having a stranglehold on the GPU market has led to a humongous surge in prices, while AMD keeps shooting themselves in the foot which allows Nvidia to gain even more market share. Apple and Samsung having the entire phone market to themselves would see Samsung offer the same sort of exorbitant prices that Apple does.

There will be no opposition to this whatsoever from any side. Artificial intelligence is here to stay and will wipe out anyone who is unwilling to change with the times. We are seeing a huge influx of AI generated art, articles, projects, even research papers (I assure you dear reader that this isn’t one of those). Half of the Instagram reels I see are made by a prompt a child can give and the output varies from being a gutter post to something so photorealistic it becomes difficult differentiating from reality. All the while chewing up insane resources and shafting the consumers on quality devices. This technology has already shown its fangs when the wrong people use it to fabricate evidence in court trials, if not detected, can lead to a miscarriage of justice (Reference: NCSC). Deepfakes were just the tip of the iceberg: voice generation, signature forging, fingerprint faking and who knows what else can be done by this cutting-edge trap.

Figure 3: Image of an Amazon AI data center in Boardman, Ore as seen on Aug 2024

(Reference: TheHill)

AI is a marvel of computer science and mathematics, and as is custom, gets twisted and demonized into an all-consuming monster by these sorts of cases. Human laziness is showing itself in full force when most CVs received by companies are AI generated. Companies themselves using crappy AI to filter out CVs. There will be no pushback to this as we want more advances in this technology. You save so much time by not doing research and instead just putting something in AI and it spits out a result for you. Any new product in the market has the word AI-powered emblazoned on it in bold letters. I want you to stop and think, where is the AI even being used here? AI powered air conditioners will learn your patterns and keep the temperature set just right for you so you don't feel even the slight bit of discomfort (Reference: Croma). We have become so lazy that we cannot even set the temperature for ourselves.

The question is not if we own our devices, it is how much these devices own us. Everything needs to be connected to the internet. Good luck getting your local electrician to fix some AI powered refrigerator. Everything needs a huge touch screen so advertisements can be given to you. You will remain plugged in because the system demands it and you will have no choice but to accept.

All of this AI penetration that somehow goes back to the shortage of memory faced by us. I went on a huge anti-AI tangent there but my point is that this memory shortage is only the beginning. It is a symptom of something big in the coming years. I don’t know what that maybe, I don’t know when it will happen, but something will.

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