Let me start by saying, I vehemently hate AI as it is. It is blight upon our planet. In so many ways.

Because of the "popularity" of AI with managers and CEOs who are, actually looking to replace all of us with a series of if/then statements, AI and LLMS have become the big tech fad these days. This has resulted in a series of repercussions for everyone else:

The AI software/LLMs require massive amounts of extremely powerful hardware, because by design, AI is horribly inefficient. So this has resulted in a "Datacenter Boom" across the planet. Datacenters are essentially just warehouses stuffed with computers. Think of Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Oracle Cloud, your Preferred hosting provider/cloud provider, Private datacenters for large companies, etc.

As you might imagine, the desire to stand up more datacenters has resulted in more hardware being bought up by the big tech conglomerates. Famously, Sam Altman of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT bought out 40% of the world's RAM production about a year ago. There are three major RAM manufacturers on the planet: Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Just kidding there's only really two now because Micron has decided that they are no longer selling to the general market and have exclusively gone to AI datacenter sales only. On top of all that, global RAM production capacity has been bought out through 2028. This of course has predictably caused the price of RAM to fucktuple.