Altman says RAM belongs in data centers, not your PC, as OpenAI's buying spree squeezes memory supply
tomwarren · x · 2026-10-31
- Speaking on the Cheeky Pint podcast, Sam Altman argued it's "quite terrible" for the world's limited DRAM supply to sit in personal PCs used 5% of the time; in a supply-constrained environment, compute should be maximally utilized in the cloud.
- He pushed back on the assumption that open-source models make local inference the endgame.
- The Verge notes the awkward context: OpenAI's buying spree is itself a major driver of the ongoing RAM shortage and price hikes, fueling criticism that Big AI wants you to rent compute rather than own it.
More from Infra
- New Yorker: The global chip supply chain is humanity's greatest collective achievement — anselm · 2026-10-31
- Intel B65 hits 62 tok/s on Qwen3.8-Flash-Next with XeStrata 4-bit offloading — SamSausages · 2026-10-31
- 16GB GPU runs Qwen3.8-27B at 110k context and 55 tok/s via iGPU display trick — jayecin · 2026-10-31
- Big Tech's future data center commitments top $3T, with Google alone over $1T — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-31
- Anthropic in talks to lease 920MW gas-powered data centre campus near Edmonton — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-10-31
- GPU price index tracks 114 rates from 25 vendors, free MCP server for agents — StasBekman · 2026-10-31