Micron says AI 'is really going to impact the supply demand balance' for PC as it's 'made memory sexy again'

Crucial Pro Overclocking memory kit on a multi-colour background.
Crucial's new Pro Overclocking memory kit. (Image credit: Future)

Micron is one of the big players in the memory business, including NAND and DRAM for SSDs and RAM, respectively. So, when VP and GM of Micron's Consumer & Components Group, Dinesh Bahal, tells you what the situation is in the market right now, you should probably listen closely.

"All three of us the big three, so Hynix, us, Samsung, are spending a lot of energy and effort towards building HBM products," Bahal says.

HBM, or High Bandwidth Memory, is a product used alongside data centre GPUs. If the name wasn't a given, its specialty is massive bandwidth, which is especially important to compute. You might remember AMD once attempted to use HBM memory in a gaming graphics card, Vega, though it ultimately was deemed too expensive and not necessarily beneficial enough to work versus GDDR5/6.

So, what's HBM memory got to do with PC builders if it's not even used in gaming graphics cards?

"The reason that's all important is there's a lot of investment going in here. And that investment is really going to impact the supply demand balance, which may not impact your readers in the short term in terms of pricing issues, et cetera. But that is really what we believe is going to continue to happen over the course of the next few years."

I'm told this has already been happening over the last nine or 10 months, which has coincided with an increase in prices for storage after being so low for so long.

"It will have an impact on the client side. From a demand perspective, or from a supply perspective."

Essentially, the focus has shifted so massively towards HBM that it will have an impact on Micron's, and potentially other memory supplier's, other products, including DRAM and NAND.

Crucial T700 SSD

(Image credit: Future)

"A bunch of consumers are in a sticker shock kind of environment of 'hey, RAM prices have always gone down. NAND prices have always gone down. I could buy a terabyte for 50 bucks. That terabyte is now 80 bucks, what's going on?'"

You guessed it: AI.

"Anybody who's talking AI, anybody who's doing AI, memory becomes at the core of it, as opposed to sitting at the edge of it. But now it's like, without memory, it ain't gonna happen."

The high demand for memory to power AI, according to Micron, is going to impact the wider supply in terms of where the focus is on the manufacturing side and how capacity is spent. Though it might also increase demand for memory on the client side, as AI PCs demand higher memory requirements than most. 

For example, Microsoft now won't certify an 8GB laptop for Copilot+. Similarly, Micron says its LPCAMM2 memory modules are poised for AI on the desktop, and so far only come in 32/64 GB capacities. 

"There are three things that AI is hungry for... bandwidth, capacity and power," Praveen Vaidyanathan, from Micron's Computer Networking business unit, tells me.

Computex 2024

The Taipei 101 building and Taipei skyline in Taiwan.

(Image credit: Jacob Ridley)

Catch up with Computex 2024: We're on the ground at Taiwan's biggest tech show to see what Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and more have to show.

While we're yet to see a must-have feature for AI on any PC, manufacturers are massively keen to whack a sticker on their products with those two letters. So, even if you're not interested, it might not matter what you think.

"Memory's become sexy again," Bahal says.

Though Micron would be keen to talk up the important of memory, demand is surely set to skyrocket with AI. Most PC and component manufacturers are looking for any way to fight the slump and reignite record sales after a couple bad years. AI is widely regarded as the best way to do just that, and it does gobble up lots and lots of memory.

Jacob Ridley
Managing Editor, Hardware

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog. From there, he graduated to professionally breaking things as hardware writer at PCGamesN, and would go on to run the team as hardware editor. He joined PC Gamer's top staff as senior hardware editor before becoming managing editor of the hardware team, and you'll now find him reporting on the latest developments in the technology and gaming industries and testing the newest PC components.

Read more
AMD Epyc 4th gen server processor on motherboard
AMD sees record revenue of $25.8 billion in 2024 thanks to data center growth—gaming last seen tumbling into a ditch
SUQIAN, CHINA - JANUARY 27, 2025 - An illustration photo shows the logo of DeepSeek and ChatGPT in Suqian, Jiangsu province, China, January 27, 2025. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
China's DeepSeek chatbot reportedly gets much more done with fewer GPUs but Nvidia still thinks it's 'excellent' news
A promotional image showing multiple Corsair Vengeance CUDIMM memory sticks on a desk
Corsair rolls out its first CUDIMM memory sticks for Intel Arrow Lake gaming PCs and they're as pricey as you'd expect them to be
Intel Arc B580 graphics card
Shipping document suggests that a 24 GB version of Intel's Arc B580 graphics card could be heading to market, though not for gaming
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 chip inside it.
Just in case you've forgotten all about them, AMD posts a less-than-convincing argument as to why AI PCs are better than any other type of PC
TAIPEI, TAIWAN - 2023/06/01: Jensen Huang, President of NVIDIA holding the Grace hopper superchip CPU used for generative AI at supermicro keynote presentation during the COMPUTEX 2023. The COMPUTEX 2023 runs from 30 May to 02 June 2023 and gathers over 1,000 exhibitors from 26 different countries with 3000 booths to display their latest products and to sign orders with foreign buyers.
Microsoft is Nvidia's biggest AI chip buyer of the year, and it's not even close. With ByteDance and Tencent coming out ahead of Zuck, Bezos, and Musk's outfits, too
Latest in Memory
A photo of Corsair's Vengeance DDR5-8400 CUDIMM memory kit
Corsair Vengeance DDR5-8400 CUDIMM review
Corsair's personalized memroy on a gradient
Corsair's new 'personalised RAM' gives you the option to pick the look and speed of memory you hide in the case anyway
A promotional image showing multiple Corsair Vengeance CUDIMM memory sticks on a desk
Corsair rolls out its first CUDIMM memory sticks for Intel Arrow Lake gaming PCs and they're as pricey as you'd expect them to be
Corsair Vengeance RAM sticks
We've more or less hit RAM price equilibrium: this 32 GB 6000 MT/s DDR5 kit is closing in on the price of a comparable DDR4 kit
G.SKILL DDR5
G.SKILL and Kingston break the 12,000MT/s DDR5 memory barrier with Intel's new Arrow Lake CPU
A pair of Team Group DDR5-RAM kits against a teal background with a white border
Need some speedy DDR5 for a new build or gaming PC upgrade? This Team Group 32 GB kit is just $86
Latest in News
Will Poulter holding a CD ROM
'What are most games about? Killing': Black Mirror Season 7 includes a follow-up to 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch
Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers
Sony, which is making a Helldivers 2 movie, is also making a new Starship Troopers movie, but it's not based on the Starship Troopers movie we already have
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Storm trooper hero
Another live service shooter is getting shut down, this time before it even launched on Steam
Possibility Space concept art.
Possibility Space owners sue NetEase for $900 million over allegations it spread 'false and defamatory rumors' of fraud at the studio that ultimately forced it to close