RAMageddon

In the autumn of 2025, the price of the memory chips inside nearly every computer on earth began to climb. Within months it had risen by half, and then it doubled again. Laptop makers repriced their products every week. Phone makers warned of the steepest decline in sales ever recorded. One of the three companies that make most of the world's memory walked away from ordinary consumers altogether.

The cause was artificial intelligence. The machines that run modern AI are limited less by how fast they can calculate than by how fast they can remember, and feeding them has created one of the great industrial bottlenecks of the age.

RAMageddon is the story of that bottleneck: the quiet technology invented on a living room couch in 1966, the towers of stacked silicon that became the new gold, the three companies that control nearly all of it, and the governments in Washington, Seoul and Beijing now fighting over it. Drawing on company filings, government records and the work of the analysts who tracked the crisis week by week, it asks whether the memory shortage is a passing storm or the beginning of a new era.

The AI revolution was supposed to be a race for computing power. It is also a race for memory.