Micron CEO warns that "AI is in the early stages" and will "need more memory," another ominous sign that the RAM crisis is going nowhere

Micron CEO has been talking about the seriousness of the RAM supply situation
Sanjay Mehrotra said that “AI is in the early stages” and will need a lot more memory to “scale up” in the future.
This follows similar warnings from the other two major memory chip makers.

We got another warning from a major memory chip maker that the RAM crisis is only going to get worse, 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 demand for AI, and the company’s CEO Sanjay Mehrotra noted that this demand is not going away and, in fact, will only get stronger.

In an interview, Mehrotra told CNBC that: “AI is in its early stages; you just saw at GTC how many advances are being made in AI. And memory is a strategic asset; you need more memory, you need faster performing memory so that AI can deliver its full capabilities.”

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“This is an inflection inflection. As inference expands, the need for tokens will increase, and those tokens need to be fast, and guess what, you need more memory, you need faster memory to be able to deliver the full potential of memory.”

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

Meanwhile, as VideoCardz recently noted, there are continuing 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 they tell us that production of the RTX 3060 could start in June.

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

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

Although 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 ominous warnings

(Image credit: Micron)

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

What’s also concerning is that Micron isn’t saying this in isolation. In fact, the two other 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 expects “a significant shortage” in its memory products to last until 2028 (at least), and SK Hynix previously warned that we could be dealing with the fallout from the RAM crisis until 2030.

With all three memory manufacturing giants issuing these kinds of ominous statements, and companies like Nvidia rumored to be resurrecting old GPUs to get around video RAM supply limitations, the prospect of the RAM crisis abating any time soon doesn’t seem likely.