Micron CEO warns “AI is in very early stages” and it will “require more memory” – another ominous sign that the RAM crisis isn’t going anywhere

Micron’s CEO has spoken about the seriousness of the RAM supply situation
Sanjay Mehrotra said that ‘AI is in very early stages’ and that AI will need a lot more memory to ‘scale up’ going forward
This follows similar warnings from the other two major memory chip makers

We’ve got another warning from a major memory chip maker 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 issues.

Wccftech reports that Micron just posted record second-quarter revenue, driven by AI demand, and the company’s CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, noted that this demand isn’t going away—in fact, it’s only going to get stronger.

In an interview, Mehrotra told CNBC that: “AI is in very early innings; you just saw at GTC how much progress is being made in AI. And memory is a strategic asset; you need more memory, you need faster performance memory for AI to deliver its full capabilities.”

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“This is inference bending. As inference expands, 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 to deliver the full potential of memory.”

“And memory today is very tight supply, and supply can’t be brought up that easily, and you see that in our results.”

Meanwhile, as VideoCardz recently pointed out, there are continued rumors that the RTX 3060 will be resurrected in its 12GB incarnation. This is according to Board Channels, a source of supply chain rumors in China, and we’re told that production of the RTX 3060 could be fired up in June.

Definitely add some spice with this one, but assuming it’s real, why might this happen? It’s in theory a move to provide some relief and additional options with more wallet-friendly Nvidia GPUs.

That largely mirrors the situation with video RAM, and while 12GB is a significant load for a budget graphics card, it’s GDDR6 memory rather than the current generation, which uses GDDR7. Therefore, it will not disturb the stock of the latter.

Although 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, hinting that it could be a lot more.

What’s also troubling is that Micron isn’t saying this in isolation. In fact, both of the other major players in the form of RAM manufacturers, Samsung and SK Hynix, have issued similar (or more severe) warnings of their own.

Samsung recently said it expects “significant shortages” across its memory products to last until 2028 (at least), and SK Hynix has previously warned that we could be dealing with fallout from the RAM crisis until as late as 2030.

With all three memory-making giants issuing such ominous statements, and Nvidia rumored to be reviving old GPUs to get around video RAM supply constraints, the prospect of the RAM crisis abating anytime soon seems unlikely.