Nvidia finance chief Collette Kress says rivals moaning about memory prices should have ordered the stuff ages ago.
Kress has blamed other firms for being caught short in the ongoing memory squeeze. She said Nvidia saw the price surge coming and acted before everyone started clutching their pearls.
In an interview with Tae Kim, Kress said her firm ordered memory in advance because it understood prices were about to go north. That is not the sort of line which will calm customers now paying more for DRAM.
The surge in memory prices has been driven by huge demand from AI chip companies. It has reshaped the industry, handing workers at SK hynix chunky bonuses while Samsung staff have been protesting.
AI GPUs have created chaos in high-bandwidth memory and DDR memory markets. These chips are greedy little beasts, and the supply chain is not enjoying the feeding frenzy.
Estimates suggest demand for Nvidia’s Rubin AI platform alone could exceed the combined memory needs of the Fruity Cargo Cult Apple and Samsung. Job’s Mob is expected to need 2.9 billion gigabytes of LPDDR memory in 2027, while Samsung may need 2.7 billion gigabytes.
Rubin AI chips could need as much as six billion gigabytes of LPDDR memory in 2027. That is the kind of number which makes procurement departments stare sadly at spreadsheets.
AI GPUs need DDR memory as well as HBM. Since both are made using the same machines, increased HBM demand pushes manufacturers to shift capacity away from DDR.
That capacity shift creates shortages in DDR too. Chinese firms are now believed to be eyeing the gap as a chance to become more important players in the memory market.
Nvidia has managed to stay ahead of the supply mess. Kress said the company had foreseen the disruption and lined up supply before the scramble began.
Discussing other firms complaining about high prices, Kress said many companies “are sitting here going, oh my gosh, the memory price went up… Nvidia knew that was going to happen. It was something everybody should have, at least we did, ordered a long time ago.”
That is a fairly blunt way of saying Nvidia thinks the rest of the industry failed its homework. It is probably true, though it is easier to say when your company is minting cash from the AI gold rush.
Kress said Nvidia was not simply buying chips off the shelf. It has been working directly with memory suppliers to design and build what it needs.
“They’re designing it with us. And then they go, now how much supply do we need? And we’re not just doing it with one. We’re doing it with all three memory suppliers. We say, here’s what we’re building. And then we’ve got to get them all in line and working with us. I don’t see another company doing that.”
The memory shortage is now another AI tax on the rest of the tech world. Nvidia gets first-class treatment because its GPUs are driving the boom which caused the mess in the first place.