Sam Altman says memory makers are wary of new fabs despite a possible $100 billion windfall

The OpenAI chief argues that scars from past overbuilding are keeping DRAM producers cautious, even as AI demand for high-bandwidth memory surges The AI boom has a new bottleneck, and it isn’t GPUs this time. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, it’s memory makers who remember exactly how badly the last party ended. Speaking on a recent podcast, Altman said the major DRAM manufacturers are hesitant to build more fabrication plants. The reason is simple: past rounds of overbuilding nearly drove them into bankruptcy. That caution persists even though, by Altman’s account, each of the big players is positioned to generate around $100 billion in annual free cash flow. When a company turns down that kind of opportunity, the trauma must run deep. A windfall nobody wants to chase too hard The companies in question are the familiar names of the memory world: Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, and Micron Technology. Their business has long been defined by brutal boom-and-bust cycles. The current boom comes from high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. Think of it as the fast-access workspace AI chips rely on to keep data flowing while they crunch through models. Demand for it is tied closely to Nvidia acc...