As the memory crisis keeps pushing up prices for PCs, consoles and phones, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has voiced a contrarian view: for him the problem is not only that data centres absorb DRAM, but also that memory ends up in ordinary people's computers.
On the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman argued that one of the causes of strain in the supply chain is the desire for local compute. While large language models run in data centres, locally run ones are, in his view, a problem, even though they are considered more sustainable. "A lot of people want local inference," he said. "And somehow they assume the problem is solved now, because we're going to have open-source models we can run on our own computers. So we're not going to need all that DRAM in the data centre."
Image: ted.com — https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_altman_openai_s_sam_altman_talks_chatgpt_ai_agents_and_superintelligence_live_at_ted2025/transcript
From a global allocation perspective, he added, it is quite terrible for everyone to have a share of the world's limited DRAM supply sitting in their own computer, used only 5% of the time. For Altman, having 32 GB of RAM in your PC amounts to collective greed, because in such a constrained environment you want maximum utilisation in the cloud, while many people's intuition points the other way.
Altman also explained that OpenAI is designing its own AI processor, called Jalapeño, designed by AI for AI. The CEO argues that since the world will have limited silicon capacity, the industry shares a common interest, and that the best use of this hardware is his own company's. The question that remains is this: what is the point of using AI to create new hardware if ordinary people cannot own, use and improve it?
Image: tribune.com.pk — https://tribune.com.pk/story/2447001/chatgpt-maker-openai-ousts-ceo-sam-altman
The stance comes as many fear a future in which computing moves from local to cloud. At the same time, Intel is shifting capacity from PC chips to data centre chips, because the memory crisis is weighing on the consumer market.
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