OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was simply taken out of context when he said that all the DRAM in the world should belong to AI firms like his so he can charge people to use it, you see.
Altman made the wildly unpopular suggestion last week on John Collison’s Cheeky Pint podcast, making the point that it’s “quite terrible” that DRAM is allocated to consumers rather than data centers where it could be used for “maximum utilization in the cloud” (read: generate profit for Altman) on a 24/7 basis. That immediately pissed off gamers.
On Wednesday, Altman changed his name to “RAM Altman” on X and bemoaned the negative response: “i actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is fucking annoying that this was taken out of context. i have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time.”
but only because…i actually do want the world to have tons of memory and people to put as much as they want in their computers, and it is fucking annoying that this was taken out of context.
i have been arguing for the world to ramp up memory production for a long time.
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 4, 2026
Altman’s right; you may have missed some helpful context. So here it is: RAM prices have skyrocketed to entirely ludicrous levels, like a floor of $450 for 32GB of DDR5 SDRAM, in large part due to data center expansions that companies like OpenAI are planning on a staggering scale. OpenAI alone plans to spend $750 billion on infrastructure by 2030. Last year, Altman struck deals with Samsung and SK Hynix to lock up an estimated 40% of global DRAM production for his own ends for years, making him personally and uniquely responsible for high DRAM prices.
Altman’s verbatim remarks on the podcast were as follows:
“But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow everyone’s—many people’s intuition is the opposite of that.”
Seems like a pretty clear hallucination to me—they’ll have to clean up Sam’s inferencing in the next major release.
Altman’s quest to dip himself in glue and roll around the entire earth picking up DRAM factories like a Katamari Damacy protagonist may run into some minor difficulties. Voters elected overwhelming Democratic majorities to the House and Senate in Tuesday’s midterm elections, with hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-GOP spending by odious tech bros backfiring spectacularly. Angry backlash to AI data center construction was a major factor in key races, and at least 38 jurisdictions voted to ban or restrict data centers. Once that blue wave is in office, OpenAI and other AI firms could face even more considerable political or regulatory setbacks.