How America’s Memory Chip Squeeze Is Another Affordability Challenge

Nick Loris writes in The National Interest about how policy can ease the memory chip shortage and the affordability crisis Americans face.

Americans just lived through one chip shortage. They’re about to live through another, and this one could hit their wallets even harder. The culprit this time isn’t a pandemic disrupting factories; it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) boom devouring the world’s memory chip supply. If Washington isn’t careful, the policy response could make the problem worse, not better.

Memory chips, dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), and NAND hold the data and storage for the modern economy. They sit inside laptops, cell phones, gaming consoles, cars, dishwashers, MRI machines, missile-defense systems, and the routers that carry our internet traffic. Nearly every sector Americans touch daily depends on them. And right now, the supply of that memory is being redirected, at scale, toward data centers.

Read more in the National Interest here.