Intel's ceo says the memory shortage will get worse, with prices up 5-7x, and calls it the founder…
intel's ceo says the memory shortage will get worse, with prices up 5-7x, and calls it the founder problem worth solving. everyone raced to buy gpus and nobody stocked hbm.
the chip shortage is just moving up the stack.
Context
Seoul Economic Daily, dated 16 September 2026, reports that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, asked on 15 September at the AI Infrastructure Forum in Santa Clara what problems he would like aspiring AI infrastructure founders to solve, pointed to the memory shortage, saying it will grow more severe, with power and cooling also major issues. TrendForce relays it with memory prices up 5 to 7x and Intel CPUs meeting just 50% of demand.
No transcript or video of Tan was inspected. The 5 to 7x is reported as a price rise, but which memory, over what period and on what basis is not shown, and R40, dated 18 September, says no basis was given and cites quarterly contract moves of 8 to 18% on its own analysis. TrendForce names a different venue, Splunk's .conf26 broadcast, than Seoul Economic Daily, and the two were not reconciled. The founder problem worth solving is a paraphrase of a question about problems for founders. HBM is not mentioned in the text read, and nobody stocked HBM is the author's opinion.
Related work
- Tan: the memory multiple is a server number (R40, 18 Sep 2026) ↗Critique with its own analysis.
- Intel CEO flags AI supply squeeze (TrendForce, 16 Sep 2026) ↗Secondary; relays Seoul Economic Daily.
Watch next
- A primary recording or transcript.
Sources
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 18 September 2026 at 10:17 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
View the original post ↗Embed this note
More notes
The air is now being asked to keep its own ledger
the air is now being asked to keep its own ledger: ecmwf’s aifs compo becomes the first ai model to forecast atmospheric composition globally every three hours, cleanair simulates 365 days of pm2.5 over china in ten seconds, and a unified framework maps six pollutants at one kilometer across the whole country. the air now files its own composition report.
read the note →The current is now being asked to draw its own map
the current is now being asked to draw its own map: china’s langya 2.0 predicts six ocean phenomena including internal waves and mesoscale eddies, a deep net called wenhai resolves eddies globally with air sea flux formulas built in, and scripps infers surface currents from the way temperature patterns deform in satellite images. the ocean now files its own circulation report.
read the note →The soil is now being asked to report its own carbon
the soil is now being asked to report its own carbon: a nix color sensor paired with generative data augmentation predicts soil organic carbon without a lab, random forest drives 74 percent of soil health mapping studies, and sentinel 2 tracks five year carbon change across france and italy from 922 samples. the dirt now files its own carbon account.
read the note →