The bold attempt to end the memory deficiency crisis

When I asked him how bad things were, Clark looked at me with a sigh. “Look, I’ve been in this for a long time. This is the worst shortage I’ve ever seen. Demand is far outpacing supply. And it’s AI-driven. It’s infrastructure-driven. I’ve seen the spot market price — up to five times as of September. And that will show. It’s already showing up in contract pricing.”

While the average person can buy directly from a retailer, laptop manufacturers have to negotiate contracts for DRAM. According to an analyst from Citrini Research, DRAM prices rose about 40 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. And they’re not slowing down; It’s escalating. Prices are expected to rise by up to 60 percent in the first quarter of this year. From everyone I spoke to this week, I got the impression that the memory deficit would last not for months but for years.

So, if waiting around isn’t the answer, what is? As it turns out, there are some very smart people in the world with some amazing ideas, all centered around reducing our reliance on AI in the cloud.

Real computer AI

You may not have heard of Phison, but the multibillion-dollar Taiwanese company has been building mission controllers for NAND flash memory chips for decades, and even claims to be the inventor of the original removable USB flash drive. The company’s founder and CEO, Pua Khein-Seng, has been vocal for months about warning about the coming memory shortage.

Pua explained to me that the current shortage of storage is not necessarily about revenue. It’s about telling stories. “Every CEO, every company, wants to increase valuation,” he says. “Stock price is storytelling. Memory companies need a story.”

In his view, that’s how we ended up where we are. But at CES, Pua didn’t just bring more concern and warnings. He brought the solution. The product is called aiDAPTIV, and it’s an add-on SSD cache for laptops that can “expand” the memory bandwidth of your computer’s GPU. Flash memory, like that found in an SSD, is typically used for long-term storage, leaving DRAM for the fast, temporary storage your system needs to function. AiDAPTIV, built using a specialized SSD design and advanced NAND correction algorithm, can, Phison claims, effectively expand memory bandwidth for AI tasks, which are currently bottlenecked.

What does all of this have to do with solving the problem of memory deficiency? 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 can reduce the DRAM capacity of laptops, from 32GB to 16GB, without reducing the capabilities of the PC. This sounds great, especially since that’s what Dell, HP, and Lenovo were planning to do anyway.

One of the great advantages of aiDAPTIV is that it does not require any internal changes to existing hardware. It only slots into an open PCIe slot. MSI and Intel have announced early support, and in theory, things could start turning around very quickly. We may all have to accept laptops with less DRAM, but if Phison’s claims are true, that may not matter as much in practice as we thought.

Peace be upon you, Mary

Ventiva cooling design.

I also spoke to Karl Schlacht, CEO of a company called Ventiva, which invented a new thermal approach that replaced laptop fans with a specialized premium cooling motor. There are no fans, just a solid thermal solution that ionizes the air to create a silent way to move the air. This is great in itself, but again, there is a way in which this new technology also addresses the problem of long-term memory deficiency. Once you remove the fans from the system, it opens up a lot of extra space for other things, like additional memory.