Rivian is hoping to cash in on the AI boom through its work on a new in-car assistant, highly automated driving features, and a new robotics project. The data center frenzy is also complicating things for the EV startup by making previously commonplace components pricier and harder to source.

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe and hardware chief Vidya Rajagopalan explained the situation during an interview with the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

"Hardware is hard in ways that I think people don’t fully always appreciate until you’re in it," Scaringe said, adding that it takes thousands of suppliers—and suppliers to suppliers—to build a car.

Today, Rivian is having a more challenging time sourcing commodity components like memory chips, Scaringe said, as insatiable demand from AI players sends prices skyrocketing.

"Three years ago, we were not spending a lot of time thinking about memory. It was a commodity," he said. "And now an enormous amount of time goes into planning for memory, optimizing it at the board level, how we’re using it, and then really thinking strategically about how we source it."

A shortage of memory chips, particularly DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, is rippling throughout the tech world. DRAM manufacturers are directing capacity toward higher-margin sales to AI firms, creating bottlenecks for other industries like automotive. Apple blamed the data center-driven run up in memory costs when it hiked prices for its laptops and other devices earlier this year.

And auto players have been sounding the alarm too. " Both GM and Ford noted higher memory costs on recent earnings calls, and both announced long-term supply deals with Micron this summer.

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