By Henry Chandonnet
Publication Date: 2026-02-20 16:52:00
The memory shortage takes no prisoners. Even Google isn’t immune.
AI companies are duking it out for greater and greater quantities of memory chips. The problem? The industry is heavily supply-constrained. Costs have skyrocketed, products have been tied up, and some companies — especially those in consumer electronics — are increasing prices.
On the AI front, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis told CNBC that physical challenges were “constraining a lot of deployment.” Google sees “so much more demand” for Gemini and its other models than it could serve, he said.
“Also, it does constrain a little bit the research,” Hassabis said. “You need a lot of chips to be able to experiment on new ideas at a big enough scale that you can actually see if they’re going to work.”
Researchers want chips, whether they work at Google, Meta, OpenAI, or other Big Tech companies, and memory is a key component. Mark Zuckerberg said that AI researchers demanded two things…
