Micron CEO warns that ‘AI is in its early stages’ and will ‘need more memory’ – another worrying sign that the RAM crisis is going nowhere

Micron CEO spoke about the severity of the RAM supply situation
Sanjay Mehrotra said that “AI is in its very early stages” and that AI will need much more memory to “scale” in the future.
This follows similar warnings from the other two major memory chip makers.

We’ve received another warning from a major memory chip maker that the RAM crisis will only get worse, and rumors continue to swirl that Nvidia may bring back an old GPU – from two generations ago – to help solve video RAM problems.

Wccftech reports that Micron just posted record second-quarter revenue, fueled by demand for AI, and the company’s CEO Sanjay Mehrotra observed that this demand isn’t going away — and in fact will only grow stronger.

In an interview, Mehrotra told CNBC that: “AI is in its infancy; 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 the AI to be able to deliver its full capabilities.

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“This is an inference inflection. As inference expands, it will increase 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 provide the full potential of the memory.”

“And memory today is a very limited supply, and the supply cannot be increased that easily, and you see that in our results.”

Meanwhile, as VideoCardz recently pointed out, rumors continue to swirl that the RTX 3060 is going to be resurrected in its 12GB incarnation. That’s according to Board Channels, a source of supply chain rumors in China, and we’re told that production of the RTX 3060 could begin in June.

Add some seasoning to this one, sure, but assuming it’s authentic, why would that happen? This is, in theory, a move to provide some relief and additional choice, with more user-friendly Nvidia GPUs.

This largely reflects the video RAM situation, and while 12GB is a considerable load for a budget graphics card, it’s GDDR6 memory rather than the current generation, which uses GDDR7. This will therefore not hinder the inventory of the latter.

Even though the RTX 3060 is an older GPU, the 12GB configuration will be tempting for some gamers looking for a cheaper card with more video memory.

Analysis: a trio of worrying warnings

(Image credit: Micron)

The Micron CEO’s key comment is that AI is in its “very early stages” and we can expect it to gobble up more memory, with the suggestion being that this could be a problem. plot more.

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

Samsung recently said it expected “significant shortages” in its memory products to last until 2028 (at least), and SK Hynix previously warned that we could face fallout from the RAM crisis until 2030.

With all three memory manufacturing giants issuing these sorts of ominous claims, and rumors of the likes of Nvidia resurrecting old GPUs to get around video RAM supply constraints, the prospect of the RAM crisis easing in the near future doesn’t seem likely.