When I asked him how bad things really were, Clarke looked at me with a sigh. “Look, I’ve been at this a long time. This is the worst shortage I’ve ever seen. Demand is way ahead of supply. And it’s driven by AI. It’s driven by infrastructure. You’ve seen the spot market price—it’s up to five times from September. That will manifest. It already has in contract pricing.”
While the average person can buy straight from a retailer, laptop manufacturers have to negotiate contracts on DRAM. According to an analyst from Citrini Research, prices on DRAM increased by around 40 percent in the final quarter of 2025. It’s not slowing down; it’s escalating. Prices will be up to 60 percent higher in the first quarter of this year. From everyone I talked to this week, I got the impression that the memory shortage would last not months but years.
So, if waiting this one out isn’t the solution, what is? As it turns out, there are some very clever people in the world with some incredible ideas, all based around reducing our dependency on AI in the cloud.
The Real AI PC
You may not have heard of Phison, but the multibillion-dollar Taiwanese company has been building critical controllers for NAND flash memory chips for decades and even claims to be the inventor of the original removable USB flash drive. The founder and CEO of the company, Pua Khein-Seng, has been outspoken for months about warning about the coming memory shortage.
Pua explained to me that the current storage shortage isn’t necessarily about revenue. It’s about storytelling. “Every CEO, every company—they want to increase valuation,” he says. “Stock price is storytelling. Memory companies need a story.”
From his perspective, that’s how we ended up where we are. But at CES, Pua didn’t just bring more concern and warnings. He brought a solution. The product is called aiDAPTIV, an add-in SSD cache for laptops that can “expand” the memory bandwidth of your PC’s GPU. Flash memory, such as what’s found in an SSD, is typically used for long-term storage, leaving the DRAM for the fast, temporary storage that your system needs to function. AiDAPTIV, which is built using a specialized SSD design and an “advanced NAND correction algorithm” can, Phison claims, effectively expand the available memory bandwidth for AI tasks, which are currently bottlenecked.
What does all that have to do with solving the memory shortage issue? Well, while enabling more AI is what aiDAPTIV was originally developed for, Pua also positioned it as a solution to the DRAM shortage. As he explained, manufacturers could lower the DRAM capacity of laptops, going from 32 GB to 16, without reducing the PC’s capabilities. That sounds like a great deal, especially since it’s what Dell, HP, and Lenovo were planning to do anyway.
One of the great advantages of aiDAPTIV is that it doesn’t require any internal changes to the existing hardware. It just slots into an open PCIe slot. MSI and Intel have announced early support, and theoretically, things could begin to shift rather quickly. We might all have to accept laptops with less DRAM, but if Phison’s claims are true, that might not matter in practice as much as we used to think.
The Hail Mary
I also spoke to Carl Schlachte, the CEO of a company called Ventiva, which has invented a novel thermal approach that replaced laptop fans with a specialized iconic cooling engine. No fans, just a solid-state thermal solution that ionizes air to create a silent way of moving air. That’s fascinating on its own, but again, there’s a way this new technology also addresses the long-term problem of the memory shortage. Once you remove fans from a system, it opens up lots of extra space for other things, such as extra memory.
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