AI Industry Is Gobbling Up Memory Chips, Causing Critical Shortage

The AI boom — and the buildout of data centers — is fueling a memory chip crisis that’s having a widening impact on consumer electronics makers.

Companies like Google and OpenAI are taking up an increasing share of chip production by buying millions of Nvidia AI accelerators that come with huge allotments of memory to run their chatbots and other apps. That means a dwindling supply of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory, chips that companies such as Tesla and Apple need to make their products.