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Is the Memory Shortage Intentional?
(research.contrary.com)
For those who don't want to read several pages of unnecessary text telling you what you probably already know:
The math, while pretty involved, may tell a straightforward story (if you’re interested in the details of our analysis, see the Appendix). OpenAI has contracted 900K memory wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix. Partner commentary seems to indicate that’s a monthly number, so that represents 10.8 million wafers over 12 months. In terms of demand, a fully built-out 10GW Stargate cluster would require ~3 million GB200 Bianca Boards. Each board requires ~50% of a memory wafer in total; split between the HBM3e stacks embedded into its two B200 GPU (~30%) and its 480 GB of LPDDR5X system memory (~20%). That puts total wafer demand for the entire cluster at ~3 million wafers.
Therefore, according to our best estimates, OpenAI likely needs less than 30% of the 10.8 million wafers it's planning to buy
So this is just putting some numbers to what a lot of people already guessed. The AI companies are not just buying a ton of RAM to build out their data centers. They aren't buying enough other components to even use that RAM. They're buying it so that no one else can.
