OpenAI's memory chip deals are driving up consumer RAM prices

RAM for your computer costs about 7 times what it did a year and a half ago, and the CEO of OpenAI just said it's "quite terrible" that so much of it is sitting in your PC. His company signed preliminary deals for up to 40% of the world's supply last year. A basic 32GB kit was $59 in April 2025. The cheapest one in the US is over $400 today. Sam said this on Stripe's Cheeky Pint podcast. He was pushing back on people who think open-source AI running at home means we won't need all these data centers. His answer was that from a "global allocation perspective," everyone keeping memory at home and using it 5% of the time is a bad deal for the world. Which is a funny thing for him in particular to worry about. When you run an AI model on your own machine, OpenAI never sees a dime. You don't…

Sam Altman says it is “quite terrible” for PCs to sit on scarce DRAM, arguing data centers use it more efficiently.

Sam Altman says it’s better for RAM to be in a data center than in your PC. These people don’t want you to own powerful computers anymore, they want you to rent them