Happy Holidays! As we like to do on The Vergecast, we take this time of year to see our families, relax and recharge, and go extremely deep into a specific technology that matters right now. This year, we picked the tiny chip in all your devices that is suddenly a precious and expensive commodity: RAM.
On this episode, David and Nilay are joined by The Verge’s Sean Hollister to get a primer on all things Random Access Memory. The hosts talk through the history of the technology, what RAM made possible in our computers, how it became utterly ubiquitous in practically every electronic device we own, and why it’s so hard to get right now. (Here’s a very 2025 spoiler alert: it’s about AI.) Then, with the help of producer Travis Larchuk, we play some RAM-related games, which go… well, they go.
After that, Sean and David chat with Dylan Patel from Semianalysis, who explains why the chip market in general is so overwhelmed right now — and why even in boom times, some companies might be reluctant to invest too heavily in scaling up. He also explains how the AI companies have cornered the market on RAM, whether the data center boom will end anytime soon, and what it all means for the prices of our devices.
Thank you so much to everyone who has listened to, watched, and talked with us about The Vergecast this year. Have a happy, restful, memory-filled holiday, and we’ll see you in 2026! Maybe even at our CES live show in Las Vegas!
In the meantime, if you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
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