The OpenAI boss reckons memory sitting in your gaming PC is a waste of the world's limited DRAM supply. That would be the supply his company helped squeeze in the first place.
Sam Altman told the Cheeky Pint podcast it's "quite terrible" for people to have DRAM in their own computers, used "5% of the time".
He wants memory in the cloud at "maximum utilization". The context was people running AI locally, but the logic covers every PC and console.
In Oct 2025 OpenAI lined up deals for up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, reportedly up to 40% of global output.
RAM prices have rocketed since, Micron is ditching its Crucial brand, and Valve's Steam Machine launched at US$1,049.
Our verdict: telling gamers their RAM is the waste, after buying up the supply, is next-level cheek.
Good news, gamers: the man whose company helped make RAM cost more than a kidney has finally identified the real problem with the memory shortage. It’s you. Specifically, it’s the 32GB sitting in your gaming rig, selfishly running Cyberpunk instead of ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the Cheeky Pint podcast that, from where he’s sitting, it’s a bit of a waste for regular people to own memory at all. The internet has reacted about as calmly as you’d expect.
Here’s the line doing the rounds, as reported by PC Gamer, TheGamer and Destructoid: “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 and being used 5% of the time.”
He followed it up with: “You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment.” In other words, your RAM should live in a data centre running flat out around the clock, and you should rent access to it. From, say, a company like OpenAI. What a coincidence.
To be fair to Sam, and we’ll only do this once, the chat was about people wanting “local inference”, meaning running AI models on their own machines instead of in the cloud. He wasn’t specifically yelling at gamers. But the logic doesn’t stop at local AI. Every gaming PC, laptop, Steam Deck and console has memory that sits idle when you’re asleep, at work or touching grass. If idle consumer RAM is “quite terrible”, that’s all of it.
The reason DRAM is in such “limited supply” isn’t that Kevin from Palmerston North bought a second stick for his Minecraft server. In October 2025, OpenAI signed letters of intent with Samsung and SK Hynix for its Stargate data centre project. Reports said that could mean up to 900,000 DRAM wafers a month, which works out to as much as 40% of the world’s DRAM output. Undiced wafers, too, not finished chips.
What followed was the worst memory crunch in years:
So the bloke who hoovered up a massive chunk of the world’s memory is now saying the leftovers in your PC are being used inefficiently. That’s like eating 40% of the pizza and then telling everyone else their slices are going cold.
Altman’s “used 5% of the time” stat is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Your fire extinguisher is used about 0% of the time, and you still want it in the house rather than in a shared warehouse across town. Some things are worth having on hand precisely because you need them right now, not after a round trip to a server in Virginia.
Gaming is the perfect example. Games need memory locally, with tiny latency, the moment you hit play. Cloud gaming exists, and anyone in New Zealand or Australia who’s tried it on a dodgy connection can tell you how that feels. Owning your hardware also means nobody can raise the subscription price, change the terms, or switch it off on you. Funny how that part never comes up in a pitch for “maximum utilization in the cloud”.
Sam, mate. We get it. You’ve got data centres to fill and investors to keep happy. But telling the people you priced out of a RAM upgrade that owning RAM is the real waste is a special kind of tone deaf. It’s a rent-everything future pitched by the bloke who’d be collecting the rent.
Our RAM stays in our PCs, thanks. Running games, 47 Chrome tabs and a Discord call with the boys. If that’s “quite terrible” for global allocation, we’ll live with it.
Reckon Sam’s got a point, or should he come and take your RAM from your cold, dead hands? Tell us in the GetRekt Discord.
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