I've been in tech for ~40 years now and I've never seen anything like this. The downstream repercussions on consumer products that have no access to cheap memory is devastating and is an extinction level event for most low-cost providers of cell phones, tvs, etc.

>I've been in tech for ~40 years now and I've never seen anything like this.

Then how do you not remember the DRAM shortage of the late 1980s?

At worse back in 1988 it impacted only PCs.

This shortage in 2026 is more consequential across the board and impacts consumer electronics as a whole and the fact it's going to last years means that many low cost manufacturers are going to close up shop because they won't be profitable.

I'm pretty sure there were more DRAM manufacturers back then, and spinning up a new fab probably didn't require as much know-how, capital or even time.

Ya, how's that working out for GPU's?

It’ll take longer for two reasons.

One is that it’s a more complicated part with tougher fab requirements.

Two is that it’s not a commodity. AMD can’t make nVidia GPUs. They have to design their own. Everyone has patents and trade secrets and copyrights. Patents expire and knowledge diffuses but that adds another time lag.

AMD and Intel are fully aware of the demand and are working on it.

RAM is a commodity. Totally interchangeable standard part. Also simpler to fab, thus quicker and easier to scale up.

Oh, and I’d like to add: everyone is afraid it’s a bubble that will pop. Nobody wants a bunch of stranded capex. That has also happened before many times. So that puts brakes on it too.

Two years remaining at least this time, according to current fab planning.

The cure for high prices is high prices.