AI memory crunch hits phones, cars

The real AI bottleneck is no longer just GPUs — it is memory, and that makes the boom much more inflationary than most developers realize.

• –Bloomberg says some DRAM spot prices have jumped nearly 700% in the past year, which turns memory from a background component into a first-order cost driver
• –HBM is pulling manufacturing capacity away from conventional DRAM because chipmakers earn more on AI-oriented parts than on commodity memory for consumer devices
• –Data centers consumed about 50% of global DRAM in 2025, up from 32% five years earlier, showing how AI workloads are reshaping the entire semiconductor supply chain
• –PC and phone makers are already responding by cutting memory in some configurations, raising prices, and reconsidering low-margin devices
• –For AI developers, this is infrastructure news with product consequences: higher model-serving costs, tighter hardware supply, and slower rollout of AI-capable edge devices