A global computer memory supply shortage started in 2024 due to supply constraints and rapid price escalation in the semiconductor memory market, particularly affecting DRAM and NAND flash memory. This shortage is sometimes labelled by tech media outlets as "RAMmageddon" or the "RAMpocalypse". Unlike the 2020–2023 global chip shortage, which stemmed primarily from pandemic-related supply chain disruptions from COVID-19, this shortage is driven by a structural reallocation of manufacturing capacity toward high-margin products for artificial intelligence infrastructure, creating scarcity of computer memory in consumer and enterprise PC markets. According to a 2026 Kearney's PERLab analysis, the shortage is expected to last at least until 2030, with CEOs agreeing with the timelines. == Background == Following a severe market downturn in 2022–2023, major memory manufacturers—Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology—implemented strategic production cuts to stabilize pricing. By mid-2024, the rapid expansion of generative AI services triggered unprecedented demand for specialized memory products, particularly High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) used in AI accelerators and data center GPUs. Specialized components of semiconductor technology are also experiencing supply constraints due to high demand in AI application. For example, glass cloth, a high-performance glass fiber substrate used for power efficient high speed data transfer and a crucial component of semiconductor manufacturing, is experiencing a supply crisis. Nitto Boseki, a Japanese firm having overwhelming monopoly in its production, is not able to meet increased demands, making chip-makers such as Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia and AMD compete for securing supply. There are also reports of smaller electronics companies struggling to find suppliers for components such as NAND flash. Memory suppliers are adapting to increased demands and market unpredictability by requiring prepayment or shorter time-frame of payment, which makes it more difficult for smaller firms to acquire capital to survive. By 2026, due to steadily increased demand on resources, CPUs are also experiencing shortage issues due to low fabrication capacity, prioritisation of server CPUs, and increased demand, with CPU prices also being forecast to increase by as much as 15%. The demand on memory has also increased strain on other electronic components such as hard disk devices, with reports such as Western Digital's hard disk supply for 2026 being booked for enterprise applications before February 2026. A 2024 McKinsey analysis projected that global demand for AI-ready data center capacity would grow at approximately 33% annually through 2030, with AI workloads consuming roughly 70% of total data center capacity by the decade's end. In addition, according to Kearney's State of Semiconductor 2025 Report, executives were already expecting a shortage in the <8nm wafer size with memory chips being mentioned as an acute source of concern. Multiple companies mentioned being prepared for it through long-term agreements with RAM suppliers or amassing additional inventory. On 24 March 2026, Google announced TurboQuant, a memory compression technology focused on large language models (LLM) and vector search engines, which it claimed achieves 6x lower memory consumption in tested local LLMs and 8x performance enhancement in tests running on H100 accelerators. The technology is also a drop in enhancement for existing inference pipeline. Amid speculation about memory demand trends, memory manufacturers, SanDisk, Micron, Western Digital and Seagate, among other companies involved in memory manufacture experienced stock price declines. Prices of memory kits also reduced in the following months, although still at inflated prices. == Causes == === HBM production displacement === HBM manufacturing requires significantly more wafer capacity per bit than standard DRAM modules. Industry sources reported that as manufacturers allocated increasing wafer capacity to HBM production to meet contracts with AI infrastructure providers, the supply of conventional DDR4 and DDR5 modules for consumer PCs and smartphones contracted sharply. By September 2025, Samsung Electronics had reportedly expanded its 1c DRAM capacity to target 60,000 wafers per month specifically for HBM4 production, further diverting resources from consumer memory lines. === Geopolitical and trade barriers === The supply chain was further constrained by escalating trade tensions between the United States and China. Throughout 2025, fears of U.S. regulatory backlash and new tariff structures led major manufacturers like Samsung and SK Hynix to halt sales of older semiconductor manufacturing equipment to Chinese entities, effectively capping production capacity in the region. Additionally, proposed tariff policies by the U.S. administration in late 2025 prompted supply chain realignments, with Apple reportedly accelerating plans to source all U.S.-bound iPhones from India to avoid potential levies. === NAND flash capacity constraints === In the NAND flash segment, manufacturers prioritized higher-margin enterprise SSDs for data center applications while phasing out older process nodes more rapidly than anticipated. In November 2025, contract prices for NAND wafers increased by more than 60% month-over-month for certain product categories, with 512GB TLC experiencing the steepest rise as legacy manufacturing capacity was retired. == Impact on industry and consumers == === Manufacturer responses === Major PC manufacturers responded to component cost increases with significant price adjustments and supply chain strategies. Dell Technologies Chief Operating Officer Jeff Clarke stated during a November 2025 analyst call that the company had "never witnessed costs escalating at the current pace," describing tighter availability across DRAM, hard drives, and NAND flash memory. Analysts at Morgan Stanley downgraded Dell Technologies stock from "Overweight" to "Underweight" in late 2025, citing the company's heavy exposure to rising server memory costs. The firm warned that skyrocketing memory prices could significantly erode margins for server and PC OEMs. Conversely, Apple Inc. was reportedly less affected than its competitors, having secured long-term supply agreements for DRAM through the first quarter of 2026. Lenovo Chief Financial Officer Winston Cheng described the cost surge as "unprecedented" and disclosed that the company's memory inventories were approximately 50% above normal levels in anticipation of further price increases. === Consumer electronics sector === The shortage particularly affected smartphone manufacturers and other consumer electronics producers. DRAM prices reportedly rose by 172% throughout 2025, leading manufacturers like Samsung to halt new orders for DDR5 modules to reassess pricing structures and Micron to exit its 'Crucial' brand of consumer products. In Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district, retailers began limiting purchases of memory products to prevent hoarding, with prices for popular DDR5 memory modules more than doubling in some cases. Despite the broad trend of rising hardware costs, some companies engaged in aggressive pricing strategies to maintain market share; for example, Sony reduced the price of the PlayStation 5 by $100 for Black Friday 2025, potentially absorbing increased component costs to stimulate software ecosystem growth. Due to memory prices more than doubling in a single quarter, HP revealed in its Q1 2026 earnings call that memory costs account for 35% of PC build materials up from 15-18% previous quarter. Despite showing strong Q1 2026 earning driven by Windows 11 upgrade cycle and AI PC adoption, HP warned investors of low operating margins and up to double digit percentage decline for coming quarter. Trendforce, an IT analytics company, updated its forecast from 1.7% year-over-year growth in PC market to 2.6% year-over-year decline for 2026, amid backdrop of steadily increasing prices and supply crisis. Research and analytics firms, Gartner and IDC expect worldwide PC market to decline 10-11% and smartphone market to decline 8-9% in 2026. Gartner also projects that rising memory prices will make low-margin entry level laptops under 500 USD financially unviable in two years. The RAM shortage has delayed the release of Valve's second Steam Machine due to increased memory prices. The device was originally set to launch in early 2026. === AI infrastructure competition === Technology companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms placed open-ended orders with memory suppliers, indicating they would accept as much supply as available regardless of cost, according to Reuters sources. The limited supply of AI chips has been cited as a reason for the slow down in compute growth. In October 2025, OpenAI formally announced a strategic partnership using letters of intent with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix
Model compression
Model compression is a machine learning technique for reducing the size of trained models. Large models can achieve high accuracy, but often at the cost of significant resource requirements. Compression techniques aim to compress models without significant performance reduction. Smaller models require less storage space, and consume less memory and compute during inference. Compressed models enable deployment on resource-constrained devices such as smartphones, embedded systems, edge computing devices, and consumer electronics computers. Efficient inference is also valuable for large corporations that serve large model inference over an API, allowing them to reduce computational costs and improve response times for users. Model compression is not to be confused with knowledge distillation, in which a smaller "student" model is trained to imitate the input-output behavior of a larger "teacher" model (as opposed to using the "teacher"'s trained parameters or the "teacher"'s training targets). == Techniques == Several techniques are employed for model compression. === Pruning === Pruning sparsifies a large model by setting some parameters to exactly zero. This effectively reduces the number of parameters. This allows the use of sparse matrix operations, which are faster than dense matrix operations. Pruning criteria can be based on magnitudes of parameters, the statistical pattern of neural activations, Hessian values, etc. === Quantization === Quantization reduces the numerical precision of weights and activations. For example, instead of storing weights as 32-bit floating-point numbers, they can be represented using 8-bit integers. Low-precision parameters take up less space, and takes less compute to perform arithmetic with. It is also possible to quantize some parameters more aggressively than others, so for example, a less important parameter can have 8-bit precision while another, more important parameter, can have 16-bit precision. Inference with such models requires mixed-precision arithmetic. Quantized models can also be used during training (rather than after training). PyTorch implements automatic mixed-precision (AMP), which performs autocasting, gradient scaling, and loss scaling. === Low-rank factorization === Weight matrices can be approximated by low-rank matrices. Let W {\displaystyle W} be a weight matrix of shape m × n {\displaystyle m\times n} . A low-rank approximation is W ≈ U V T {\displaystyle W\approx UV^{T}} , where U {\displaystyle U} and V {\displaystyle V} are matrices of shapes m × k , n × k {\displaystyle m\times k,n\times k} . When k {\displaystyle k} is small, this both reduces the number of parameters needed to represent W {\displaystyle W} approximately, and accelerates matrix multiplication by W {\displaystyle W} . Low-rank approximations can be found by singular value decomposition (SVD). The choice of rank for each weight matrix is a hyperparameter, and jointly optimized as a mixed discrete-continuous optimization problem. The rank of weight matrices may also be pruned after training, taking into account the effect of activation functions like ReLU on the implicit rank of the weight matrices. == Training == Model compression may be decoupled from training, that is, a model is first trained without regard for how it might be compressed, then it is compressed. However, it may also be combined with training. The "train big, then compress" method trains a large model for a small number of training steps (less than it would be if it were trained to convergence), then heavily compress the model. It is found that at the same compute budget, this method results in a better model than lightly compressed, small models. In Deep Compression, the compression has three steps. First loop (pruning): prune all weights lower than a threshold, then finetune the network, then prune again, etc. Second loop (quantization): cluster weights, then enforce weight sharing among all weights in each cluster, then finetune the network, then cluster again, etc. Third step: Use Huffman coding to losslessly compress the model. The SqueezeNet paper reported that Deep Compression achieved a compression ratio of 35 on AlexNet, and a ratio of ~10 on SqueezeNets.
The Best Free AI Coding Assistant for Beginners
Trying to pick the best AI coding assistant? An AI coding assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI coding assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.
The Best Free AI Writing Assistant for Beginners
Shopping for the best AI writing assistant? An AI writing assistant is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it keeps getting smarter as the underlying models improve. Pricing, accuracy, and the size of the model behind the tool are the three factors that most affect daily usefulness. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI writing assistant slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Below we compare features, pricing, and real output so you can choose with confidence.
AI Image Generators Reviews: What Actually Works in 2026
Trying to pick the best AI image generator? An AI image generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI image generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.
Character computing
Character computing is a trans-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of computer science and psychology. It is any computing that incorporates the human character within its context. Character is defined as all features or characteristics defining an individual and guiding their behavior in a specific situation. It consists of stable trait markers (e.g., personality, background, history, socio-economic embeddings, culture,...) and variable state markers (emotions, health, cognitive state, ...). Character computing aims at providing a holistic psychologically driven model of human behavior. It models and predicts behavior based on the relationships between a situation and character. Three main research modules fall under the umbrella of character computing: character sensing and profiling, character-aware adaptive systems, and artificial characters. == Overview == Character computing can be viewed as an extension of the well-established field of affective computing. Based on the foundations of the different psychology branches, it advocates defining behavior as a compound attribute that is not driven by either personality, emotions, situation or cognition alone. It rather defines behavior as a function of everything that makes up an individual i.e., their character and the situation they are in. Affective computing aims at allowing machines to understand and translate the non-verbal cues of individuals into affect. Accordingly, character computing aims at understanding the character attributes of an individual and the situation to translate it to predicted behavior, and vice versa. ''In practical terms, depending on the application context, character computing is a branch of research that deals with the design of systems and interfaces that can observe, sense, predict, adapt to, affect, understand, or simulate the following: character based on behavior and situation, behavior based on character and situation, or situation based on character and behavior.'' The Character-Behavior-Situation (CBS) triad is at the core of character computing and defines each of the three edges based on the other two. Character computing relies on simultaneous development from a computational and psychological perspective and is intended to be used by researchers in both fields. Its main concept is aligning the computational model of character computing with empirical results from in-lab and in-the-wild psychology experiments. The model is to be continuously built and validated through the emergence of new data. Similar to affective and personality computing, the model is to be used as a base for different applications towards improving user experience. == History == Character computing as such was first coined in its first workshop in 2017. Since then it has had 3 international workshops and numerous publications. Despite its young age, it has already drawn some interest in the research community, leading to the publication of the first book under the same title in early 2020 published by Springer Nature. Research that can be categorized under the field dates much older than 2017. The notion of combining several factors towards the explanation of behavior or traits and states has long been investigated in both Psychology and Computer Science, for example. == Character == The word character originates from the Greek word meaning “stamping tool”, referring to distinctive features and traits. Over the years it has been given many different connotations, like the moral character in philosophy, the temperament in psychology, a person in literature or an avatar in various virtual worlds, including video games. According to character computing character is a unification of all the previous definitions, by referring back to the original meaning of the word. Character is defined as the holistic concept representing all interacting trait and state markers that distinguish an individual. Traits are characteristics that mainly remain stable over time. Traits include personality, affect, socio-demographics, and general health. States are characteristics that vary in short periods of time. They include emotions, well-being, health, cognitive state. Each characteristic has many representation methods and psychological models. The different models can be combined or one model can be preset for each characteristic. This depends on the use-case and the design choices. == Areas == Research into character computing can be divided into three areas, which complement each other but can each be investigated separately. The first area is sensing and predicting character states and traits or ensuing behavior. The second area is adapting applications to certain character states or traits and the behavior they predict. It also deals with trying to change or monitor such behavior. The final area deals with creating artificial agents e.g., chatbots or virtual reality avatars that exhibit certain characteristics. The three areas are investigated separately and build on existing findings in the literature. The results of each of the three areas can also be used as a stepping stone for the next area. Each of the three areas has already been investigated on its own in different research fields with focus on different subsets of character. For example, affective computing and personality computing both cover different areas with a focus on some character components without the others to account for human behavior. == The Character-Behavior-Situation triad == Character computing is based on a holistic psychologically driven model of human behavior. Human behavior is modeled and predicted based on the relationships between a situation and a human's character. To further define character in a more formal or holistic manner, we represent it in light of the Character–Behavior–Situation triad. This highlights that character not only determines who we are but how we are, i.e., how we behave. The triad investigated in Personality Psychology is extended through character computing to the Character–Behavior–Situation triad. Any member of the CBS triad is a function of the two other members, e.g., given the situation and personality, the behavior can be predicted. Each of the components in the triad can be further decomposed into smaller units and features that may best represent the human's behavior or character in a particular situation. Character is thus behind a person's behavior in any given situation. While this is a causality relation, the correlation between the three components is often more easily used to predict the components that are most difficult to measure from those measured more easily. There are infinitely many components to include in the representation of any of C, B, and S. The challenge is always to choose the smallest subset needed for prediction of a person's behavior in a particular situation.
AI Clip Makers Reviews: What Actually Works in 2026
In search of the best AI clip maker? An AI clip maker is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI clip maker slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.