The global shortage of memory chips — the RAM and storage that every phone, laptop, and server depends on — is turning out to be deeper and longer-lasting than the industry expected.
Analysis from Deloitte, reported by GamesBeat, concludes that the crunch is worse than anticipated and could run until 2029 or 2030. That is an unusually long horizon for a business that normally swings from glut to shortage in a couple of years.
The cause, by most accounts, is artificial intelligence. According to a report on Samsung's outlook carried by Newsbytes, soaring demand for advanced memory chips driven by AI is behind the global shortage, pushing up prices for electronics and potentially affecting vehicles through 2028. AI data centers consume enormous quantities of high-end memory, and that demand is competing directly with the chips that go into ordinary consumer devices.
The effects are already visible at both ends of the market. TechCrunch reports that the shortage appears to be affecting the availability of the MacBook Air, Apple's most popular Mac. At the other end of the supply chain, an MSN report describes a Hong Kong computer shop that has pinned printouts of news articles about the shortage next to its price list — an improvised explanation for customers confused about why components suddenly cost more.
The industry nickname for all this, appearing across several reports, is "RAMaggedon."
The reason this matters beyond the tech aisle: memory is a commodity input to nearly everything with a chip in it, so a multi-year squeeze means higher prices and thinner availability for laptops, phones, game consoles, and eventually cars — not as a one-off spike, but as a condition consumers may be living with for the rest of the decade.