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.

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.

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