Sam Altman made headlines over the weekend by ruffling the feathers of the very consumer market he's already been pissing off for the last year: PC gamers. In an interview, the CEO of OpenAI seemed to be pleading for sympathy as he said it was "quite terrible" that RAM for gaming exists, and suggested that we as humans should all be for funneling more supply toward training AI models in data centers.
For full context, Altman said: "From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAMs sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time.
"Like, you want maximum utilization in a cloud if you're trying to deal with a very supply-constrained environment," he said.
I've been covering this year's global RAM shortages from the get-go, so as you can imagine, I have some thoughts. But perhaps more alarming than anything is the fact that Altman, one of the foremost names in AI and tech, seems to suggests that consumers who buy and install RAM in their personal computers are only making use of it 5% of the time? I don't know how many gaming PCs he's tried to build, but if he's only used RAM in 5% of them, I don't think he'll have been very successful.
Now, to be as fair as I can be, I'm sure he wasn't talking about active PC gamers like you and me. It's far more likely he was talking about inactive computers or older ones that aren't in use anymore but still have RAM in them that data centers could make use of. Either way, what a bold and dangerously inaccurate statement for someone in his position to make, especially considering how much of the global tech market his company's relentless development of AI has disrupted in 2026.
In case you don't know, there's a global RAM and storage shortage going on right now, specifically because of AI companies building data centers and training their models, all of which need a ridiculous amount of compute in order to learn. For example, Samsung is one of the three biggest manufacturers of RAM on planet Earth, and it signed a supply deal with Altman's company late last year to supply OpenAI with 900,000 DRAM/HBM wafers per month - which counts as roughly 40% of the entire world's RAM manufacturing output. Only yesterday, it was reported by Tom's Hardware that Altman has negotiated a further deal with Samsung amidst RAM shortages.
Remember too, that this is only one of the big AI companies we're talking about here. Anthropic, Google, Meta, XAI, and more will all need their own massive stores of RAM as well.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/hardware/desktop-pc/if-sam-altman-thinks-gaming-pcs-only-use-ram-5-percent-of-the-time-he-knows-less-about-technology-than-i-thought
