It is called RAMageddon and it is caused by the expansion of server farms that have absorbed not only the current global supply of chips but also its production capacity for several years.
The end of affordable laptops, budget smartphones, and accessible consoles could be very near. Not because new models are technologically more advanced, but because the cost of the components needed to build them has skyrocketed, particularly the cost of memory chips. Recently, major laptop and smartphone manufacturers, including Microsoft, Samsung, and Dell, have started raising prices and withdrawing the cheaper models from the market: the main cause would be the shortage of memory chips, which makes it unprofitable to sell those devices at prices that until recently were market price. This crisis already has a name, as catchy as all the names that the English language knows how to invent in these circumstances (do you remember the jobpocalypse?):RAMageddon, a blend of RAM (Random Access Memory, the component of the computer where data is written, stored, and rewritten) and Armageddon.
As the Guardianwrites, the analysis company TrendForce estimates that the prices of mid-range laptops, which generally cost around 700 euros, could increase by up to 40 percent by 2026. And the same will apply to all technology that we currently consider more or less affordable from an economic point of view. Why is this happening? As is increasingly the case, the answer to this question is: because of AI, particularly due to the ever-increasing number of data centers being built around the world to allow AIs to generate slop, brain rot, and provide incorrect answers to simple questions. The massive investments in the AI industry have led to an increase in the number of server farms, which are huge warehouses full of computers that in turn are filled with enormous quantities of high-end memory chips.
The increase in server farms has almost completely absorbed the current global supply of memory chips, but not only that: it has also almost completely absorbed the supply for the coming years, creating such a severe shortage that the cost of all electronic devices has significantly increased in a very short time, a trend that all experts now predict will continue until 2028 (at least). However, there are some precautions that can be taken to avoid becoming victims of RAMageddon: the first is to look among older device models that may still be on sale, specifically among products that were among the best before the increase in memory costs began to be felt (though there is no certainty in this regard: companies may have already raised the price of older models still on the market). The second precaution is quite predictable: refurbished devices, because a used RAM is still a used RAM and there is a limit to how much can be asked for a second-hand device. At least for now.
