The OpenAI boss reckons memory sitting in home PCs is a "quite terrible" use of scarce supply that belongs in the cloud. Gamers paying record prices for RAM disagree, and so does Musk.
On the Cheeky Pint podcast, Sam Altman said it's "quite terrible" for the world's limited DRAM to sit in home PCs, which he claims are used about 5% of the time.
He argued memory gets better use in the cloud. He gave no data for the 5% figure and didn't call for limits on consumer RAM.
Elon Musk mocked him on X with an Inglourious Basterds meme: "The people deserve to have their RAM too!"
RAM prices have soared as memory makers chase AI money. Trackers have 32GB DDR5 kits at roughly four times early-2025 prices.
OpenAI's Stargate deals with Samsung and SK Hynix target up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, possibly up to 40% of world supply.
Sam Altman has looked at the 32GB of RAM in your gaming rig, the RAM you paid triple for this year, and decided it’s a waste. The OpenAI boss reckons memory sitting in home PCs is a bad use of the world’s scarce supply, and that it’d be better off in the cloud. In data centres. Like, for example, his.
Elon Musk, never one to miss a chance to kick his old OpenAI co-founder, jumped straight on it. For once, PC gamers are on Musk’s side, even if he’s a funny sort of champion for the little guy.
The comments came on episode 39 of Cheeky Pint, the podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, released on Thursday 29 October, US time. Talking about the AI boom’s memory crunch, Altman said a lot of people want to run AI models locally and wrongly “assume that the problem is solved now” because open-source models exist.
Then came the line that set PC Twitter on fire. He said that “from a global allocation perspective, actually, it’s quite terrible” to have “everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer”, used, by his reckoning, about 5 per cent of the time. What matters when supply is this tight, he argued, is “maximum utilization in the cloud”. He didn’t give any data for that 5 per cent figure, and he didn’t call for limits on consumer RAM.
To be fair to him, he also had a crack at the memory makers. He said DRAM producers have been burned so badly by past boom-and-bust cycles, where they’d spend US$20 billion on factories to make US$19 billion back, that they’re slow to build new capacity. He said he wants chip and energy prices to come down, but that supply has to go way up first. “If it doesn’t go down, I’ll be very sad,” he said.
On Sunday, US time, Musk posted a meme on X of Hans Landa, Christoph Waltz’s Nazi interrogator from Inglourious Basterds, asking whether DRAM was being withheld from the cloud. His caption: “The people deserve to have their RAM too!”
It’s the latest round in a feud that’s been running since Musk walked away from OpenAI in 2018. He sued OpenAI and Altman in 2024, claiming they’d abandoned the nonprofit mission he’d bankrolled, and in May a federal jury in California rejected the US$150 billion lawsuit, finding OpenAI, Altman and president Greg Brockman not liable on all claims. Musk now runs rival AI outfit xAI, which is building its own giant Colossus supercomputers. Those eat a mountain of memory too, which makes his sudden concern for your desktop a bit rich.
The reason this hit a nerve is that PC gamers are already paying for the AI boom every time they buy memory. AI accelerators run on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, and the big memory makers have shifted huge amounts of production over to it because the data centre money is so good. That leaves less capacity for the regular DRAM that goes in your PC, console and phone.
Here’s the bit that makes Altman’s comments land like a lead balloon. In October 2025, Samsung and SK Hynix signed letters of intent to supply OpenAI’s Stargate data centre project, with expected demand of up to 900,000 DRAM wafer starts a month. Industry analysts TechInsights put total global DRAM output at roughly 2.25 million wafers a month in 2025, which is how outlets got to Stargate potentially wanting up to 40 per cent of the world’s supply.
Those are letters of intent and projections, not locked-in volumes, so don’t take the 40 per cent as gospel. But the direction of travel is obvious. The bloke telling you your RAM would be better used in the cloud is the same bloke trying to buy a huge slice of it for his cloud.
Altman isn’t wrong that a data centre runs its memory harder than your PC does. That’s just maths. But “5 per cent of the time” is a number pulled out of thin air, and it falls apart the second you load a modern game that wants 16GB or more just to stop stuttering. RAM isn’t idle when you’re not using all of it either. Your PC uses it for caching so everything else is quicker.
The real problem is where the argument leads. If the “efficient” answer is that ordinary people shouldn’t own decent hardware, then the alternative is renting it back by the month from companies like OpenAI. That’s great for OpenAI. It’s rubbish for anyone who wants to game offline, run a local model privately, or just own the stuff they paid for. Altman says he’ll be “very sad” if prices don’t fall, and his own company is one of the biggest reasons they haven’t.
As for Musk, credit where it’s due, the meme was funny. Just don’t mistake it for a principled stand. Both of these blokes are buying memory by the wafer, and neither is going to give any of it back to you. Is your RAM working hard enough for Sam? Tell us in the comments, or come argue about it in the GetRekt Discord.
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