Sam Altman says DRAM sitting in personal computers is "quite terrible"
Sam Altman at TED in April 2025.
Source: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, cropped
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OpenAI chief Sam Altman has a blunt view of where the world's memory chips should go. On the Cheeky Pint podcast with John Collison, published on 29 October, he said "it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer."
His argument is about utilisation. He says DRAM in a personal machine is used about 5% of the time, while the same memory gets far more use in the cloud.
Altman does not blame the chipmakers for the shortage. "For a very long time, if you were a producer of DRAM, you would invest $20 billion of CapEx to make $19 billion," he said, and he expects them to stay cautious about spending on new capacity after past boom-and-bust cycles.
The 5% figure is Altman's own. OpenAI is also one of the big buyers of data center hardware, so he is not a neutral observer.
Sources
- Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence, Cheeky Pint transcript