Jetson Thor price jumps from $3.5K to $5.5K as DRAM crunch pushes robots toward cloud inference
IanAndrewsDC · x · 2026-09-08
- Quoting an analysis of the future of robot inference, arguing on-device plus cloud inference is the unlock for more capable and safe robots
- DRAM supply crunch prices low-cost robotics out of frontier intelligence: Jetson Thor went from $3.5K to $5.5K, with LPDDR being siphoned into Vera Rubin racks
- Memory- and token-hungry in-context learning (Skild AI, Generalist AI) will only get heavier at long horizons; ICL prefixes mean more KV cache movement on limited onboard compute
- Economics at scale work: hosting 8 robots on a single datacenter GPU with acceptable latency has been proven
- Conclusion: hybrid on-device + cloud inference looks like the path forward
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