Micron is one of the big players in the memory business, including NAND and DRAM for SSDs and RAM, respectively.1 Therefore, when Dinesh Bahal, VP and GM of Micron's Consumer & Components Group, tells us the current market situation, you probably need to listen carefully.

"We, the Big Three, Hynix, the United States and Samsung, are putting a lot of energy and effort into building HBM products," Bahal says.

HBM, or high-bandwidth memory, is a product used with data center GPUs. If the name is not specified, then its specialty is a large bandwidth, which is especially important to calculate. You may remember that AMD once tried to use HBM memory on the gaming graphics card Vega, but in the end it was considered too expensive and not necessarily beneficial to work compared to GDDR5/6.

, what does hbm memory have to do with PC builder if it is not used even on gaming graphics cards?

"The reason it all matters is because there is a lot of investment here. And that investment will really affect the supply and demand balance that may not affect your readers in the short term in terms of price issues and so on. But that's really what we believe will continue to happen over the next few years."

I have been told that this has already happened over the past 9 or 10 months, but this has been happening for a long time with a rise in the price of storage after a very low

"It affects the client side. In terms of demand or in terms of supply."

In essence, the focus has shifted so much to HBM that it will affect other products, including DRAM and NAND, from Micron and potentially other memory suppliers.

"Chip consumers are in a sticker shock-like environment Hi, RAM prices are also coming down. The price of NAND is constantly falling. I could buy a terabyte for550. That terabyte is nowド80, what's going on?

You guessed it: AI.

"Whoever is talking AI, who is doing AI, the memory will be at its core, not sitting on the edge of it. But now it is such that without memory, it will not happen.

According to Micron, the high demand for memory to power AI will affect a wider supply in terms of where the manufacturing side is focused and how the capacity is spent. As AI PCs demand higher memory requirements than most, the demand for memory on the client side may also increase. 

For example, Microsoft does not authenticate 8GB laptops for Copilot+. Similarly, Micron says that the lpcamm2 memory module is prepared for AI on the desktop and so far only has 32/64GB of capacity. 

"There are 3 things AI wants... Bandwidth, capacity and power," Praveen Vaidyanathan, from Micron Computer Networking Business Unit, tells me.

We have not yet seen a mandatory feature for AI on any PC, but manufacturers are massively keen to bang stickers on their products with those two characters, so it may not matter what you think, even if you are not interested.

"The memory will be sexy again," Bahar says.

Micron wants to talk about the importance of memory, but demand is certainly set to skyrocket with AI. Most PC and component manufacturers are looking for ways to fight the downturn and rekindle record sales after a few bad years. AI is widely regarded as the best way to do it, and it consumes a lot of memory.