The bold attempt to end the memory loss crisis

When I asked her how bad things really were, Clarke looked at me with a sigh. “Look, I’ve been here a long time. This is the worst shortage I’ve ever seen. Demand is way ahead of supply. And it’s driven by AI. It’s driven by infrastructure. You’ve seen the spot market price – it’s up to five times higher than it was in September. That will show up. It’s already written into the contract prices.”

While the average person can buy directly from a retailer, laptop manufacturers must negotiate contracts on DRAM. According to an analyst at Citrini Research, DRAM prices rose about 40% in the last quarter of 2025. It’s not slowing down; it intensifies. Prices will be up to 60 percent higher in the first quarter of this year. From everyone I spoke to this week, I got the impression that the memory loss would not last for months but for years.

So, if waiting is not the solution, what is? It turns out there are some very smart people in the world with incredible ideas, all based around reducing our reliance on AI in the cloud.

The real AI PC

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

Pua explained to me that the current storage shortage is not necessarily income-related. It’s about telling a story. “Every CEO, every company wants to increase valuation,” he says. “Stock prices tell a story. Memory companies need a story.”

From his perspective, that’s how we got here. But at CES, Pua didn’t just spark more concerns and warnings. He provided a solution. The product is called aiDAPTIVan add-on SSD cache for laptops that can “extend” the memory bandwidth of your PC’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 operate. AiDAPTIV, which is built using a specialized SSD design and an “advanced NAND correction algorithm,” Phison claims, can effectively expand the memory bandwidth available for AI tasks, which are currently bottlenecked.

What does all this have to do with solving the out of memory problem? Well, even though aiDAPTIV was initially developed to enable more AI, Pua has also positioned it as a solution to the DRAM shortage. As he explained, manufacturers could reduce the DRAM capacity of laptops, dropping it from 32 GB to 16 GB, without reducing the PC’s capabilities. That seems like a good deal, 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 modifications to existing hardware. It simply inserts into an open PCIe slot. MSI and Intel have announced early support and, in theory, things could start changing fairly quickly. We may all have to accept laptops with less DRAM, but if Phison’s claims are true, it may not matter as much in practice as we thought.

The Hail Mary

Ventiva’s cooling design.

I also spoke to Carl Schlachte, CEO of a company called Ventifwho invented a new thermal approach that replaced laptop fans with a specialized iconic cooling engine. No fans, just a solid-state thermal solution that ionizes the air to create a quiet way to move air. This is fascinating in itself, but again, this new technology also helps solve the long-term problem of lack of memory. Once you remove the fans from a system, it frees up a lot of extra space for other things, like additional memory.