Sam Altman says it’s better for RAM to be in a data center than on your desk

AI News Tech Sam Altman says it’s better for RAM to be in a data center than on your desk As OpenAI’s buying spree squeezes the world’s supply of RAM, its CEO explains why he needs so much.

As OpenAI’s buying spree squeezes the world’s supply of RAM, its CEO explains why he needs so much.

Stevie Bonifield Oct 30, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC Link Share Gift Image: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images Part Of RAM price hikes: the latest on the global memory shortage see all updates Stevie Bonifield is a news writer covering all things consumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writing news and reviews on hardware, gaming, and AI. Asked about supply chain shortages, like the ongoing RAM shortage , OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview that it’s “terrible” to have RAM in personal PCs instead of data centers. During his appearance on the Cheeky Pint podcast, where he also commented on AI’s impact on math , Altman said:

“A lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now because we are going to have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

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 being used five percent of the time.

You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone’s— many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”

Whether Altman meant your gaming PC or developers working with something like the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box or the new touchscreen MacBook Pro , the outcome is the same. Right now, memory companies Samsung and SK Hynix have long term deals with cloud service operators and projects like OpenAI’s Stargate that have reserved much of the world’s RAM output over the next few years. And the billions they’re willing to lay out for chips is why the laptops, phones, and other tech you use are getting more expensive right now.

Stevie Bonifield AI News OpenAI Tech More in: RAM price hikes: the latest on the global memory shortage Samsung’s expecting the RAM shortage to last until at least 2028. Stevie Bonifield Oct 29 Apple raises the MacBook Neo’s student pricing again Stevie Bonifield Oct 28 SK Hynix says memory shortages will last through 2030. Dominic Preston Oct 28 Most Popular Most Popular Reddit will force everyone to log in Microsoft’s AI future has fewer jobs The Apple Pencil turned the Duo into my new favorite notebook Sam Altman sympathizes with mathematicians, but says OpenAI’s math onslaught won’t stop Anthropic’s business plan: Build God or die trying Advertiser Content From This is the title for the native ad

Fuente: The Verge