Nvidia Corp. supplier Micron Technology Inc. said an ongoing memory chip shortage has accelerated over the past quarter and reiterated that the crunch will last beyond this year due to a surge in demand for high-end semiconductors required for AI infrastructure.
“The shortage we are seeing is really unprecedented,” Micron Executive Vice President of Operations Manish Bhatia said in an interview shortly after the chipmaker held a groundbreaking ceremony for a $100 billion production site outside Syracuse, New York, on Friday, amplifying a similar forecast the company provided in December.
High-bandwidth memory required to make artificial intelligence accelerators is “consuming so much of the available capacity across the industry that it’s leaving a tremendous shortage for the conventional side of the industry, for phones or PCs,” Bhatia said.
He added that PC and smartphone makers have joined the queue to try to lock up memory chips after 2026, while autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots will further drive demand for those components.
On Friday, Chinese media outlet Jiemian reported that major Chinese smartphone makers including Xiaomi Corp., Oppo and Shenzhen Transsion Holdings Co. are trimming their shipment targets for 2026 due to rising memory costs, with Oppo cutting its forecast by as much as 20%. All three did not respond to requests for comment.
Global smartphone shipments may decline 2.1% this year as a shortage of memory chips drives up costs and squeezes production, industry tracker Counterpoint Research estimated in December. PC makers including Dell Technologies Inc. have also warned they are likely to be affected by the ongoing shortage.
The big three of the global memory chip industry — Micron, SK Hynix Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. — saw their share prices surge in 2025 thanks to the AI boom. SK Hynix said it has sold out its entire chip slate in 2026, while Micron has said its AI memory semiconductors are also fully booked this year.
To prioritize supplying strategic enterprise customers including Nvidia, Micron said in December it will end its popular Crucial-branded consumer memory business. The AI industry’s insatiable appetite for memory chips is also adding urgency to Micron’s manufacturing expansion in both the US and Asia.
On Saturday, Micron announced plans to pay $1.8 billion for a site with an existing plant in Taiwan, which serves as a key production hub for the Boise, Idaho-based chipmaker.
That move significantly shortens the time for Micron to bring a new factory online. The company says it will start meaningful output of DRAM wafers in the second half of 2027.
DRAM provides the operating environment for complex processors from Nvidia and Intel Corp. to make calculations and is at the heart of high-bandwidth memory required for AI accelerators to work optimally.
“What we’ll be doing at our Asian sites is continuing to transition to the next generation of technology,” Bhatia said during the Friday interview.
New wafer capacity, on the other hand, will take place almost entirely in the US, he added.
Micron’s $100 billion project near Syracuse is slated to host four DRAM fabs — each about the size of 10 football fields. First wafers are coming out of the production lines by 2030.
The US chipmaker is adding two fabs’ worth of capacity in Boise alongside existing research and development facilities there. The first Idaho fab is scheduled to begin production in 2027, and a second factory is being planned. It is also modernizing and expanding an existing manufacturing facility in Virginia.
The plans are all part of the company’s commitment to bring 40% of its DRAM manufacturing onto US soil, a goal enabled by a $6.2 billion Chips Act award the company clinched in 2024, and the ability to tap into a now-35% tax credit while construction is ongoing.
Easy fix “Nvidia, no one has the supply your asking for, you can wait for your order just like anyone else” Imagine a company ordering the world supply of paper and being told “yes, we’ll divert all stock straight you and everyone else can have the leftovers for 8x the cost.”
Nvidia: “we will pay you three times your asking cost”
Mfrs: “yes sir, your chips, right away sir”
The plans are all part of the company’s commitment to bring 40% of its DRAM manufacturing onto US soil, a goal enabled by a $6.2 billion Chips Act award the company clinched in 2024, and the ability to tap into a now-35% tax credit while construction is ongoing.
So nice that taxpayers are funding their own shortages now.>
Good news is that when it crashes theres gonna be so much surplus.
Bruh, its good to have some hope but im sure they will find a way to screw us anyways. Economy goes up, rich gets richer. Economy goes down, rich gets richer.
A lot of that memory is at best ECC-enabled, or HBM at worst, so it won’t be…
You’re not wrong, but when/if (joyously, apparently, often it’s more profitable to destroy things for the tax break than to sell them) a significant surplus appears, adapters or new motherboards will appear fairly soon. Even things like H200s can probably be made into co-processors (hopefully running at a sane wattage for home users), as u/tal says there’s already ways to integrate into the linux kernel as (very fast) RAM, I doubt the compute will be left on the table for long.
H200 PCIe5 x 16 card anyone?
There might be some way to make use of it.
Linux apparently can use VRAM as a swap target:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap_on_video_RAM
So you could probably take an Nvidia H200 (141 GB memory) and set it as a high-priority swap partition, say.
Normally, a typical desktop is liable to have problems powering an H200 (600W max TDP), but that’s with all the parallel compute hardware active, and I assume that if all you’re doing is moving stuff in and out of memory, it won’t use much power, same as a typical gaming-oriented GPU.
That being said, it sounds like the route on the Arch Wiki above is using vramfs, which is a FUSE filesystem, which means that it’s running in userspace rather than kernelspace, which probably means that it will have more overhead than is really necessary.
EDIT: I think that a lot will come down to where research goes. If it turns out that someone figures out that changing the hardware (having a lot more memory, adding new operations, whatever) dramatically improves performance for AI stuff, I suspect that current hardware might get dumped sooner rather than later as datacenters shift to new hardware. Lot of unknowns there that nobody will really have the answers to yet.
EDIT2: Apparently someone made a kernel-based implementation for Nvidia cards to use the stuff directly as CPU-addressable memory, not swap.
https://github.com/magneato/pseudoscopic
In holography, a pseudoscopic image reverses depth—what was near becomes far, what was far becomes near. This driver performs the same reversal in compute architecture: GPU memory, designed to serve massively parallel workloads, now serves the CPU as directly-addressable system RAM.
Why? Because sometimes you have 16GB of HBM2 sitting idle while your neural network inference is memory-bound on the CPU side. Because sometimes constraints breed elegance. Because we can.
Pseudoscopic exposes NVIDIA Tesla/Datacenter GPU VRAM as CPU-addressable memory through Linux’s Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) subsystem. Not swap. Not a block device. Actual memory with struct page backing, transparent page migration, and full kernel integration.
I’d guess that that’ll probably perform substantially better.
It looks like they presently only target older cards, though.
ECC might be slower but if a ton of it floods the market all at once it could still be a good 2x64 GB purchase. Plus, it’ll be great for selfhosts even if not for gamers.
You can’t put the kind of memory used in servers (registered ECC dimm) into normal/personal computers. It’s not just that the ECC won’t work, they don’t work at all.
That’s different with unregistered ECC dimms, those will work (at normal spec speeds), but the ECC part will just be unused. These are in the minority though for servers, in practice they are more used in workstations.
ECC these days is decent, I wouldn’t hate it even in my gaming PC. It’s the HBM that I’m worried about.
Investing 1.8 bn just before China invades… Ok then.
