RAM Wars: Musk Tells Altman to Stop Hoarding Compute for Cloud AI

Elon Musk mocked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s argument that the world’s limited supply of computer memory should be prioritized for AI data centers rather than home PCs, responding with a meme on Sunday about users “withholding” DRAM from the cloud.

Altman made the comments in an interview with the YouTube channel Cheeky Pint while discussing memory and component shortages caused by the AI boom. “A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we're going to have open-source models,” he said, referring to running AI models on a user’s own hardware. “But from like a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time.”

“You want maximum utilization in a cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,” Altman added. “And somehow, many people's intuition is the opposite of that.” Musk shared a meme featuring Hans Landa, the Nazi officer played by Christoph Waltz in the film Inglourious Basterds, and wrote: “You are withholding DRAM from the cloud, are you not?” He added: “The people deserve to have their RAM too!” The post was dated November 1, 2026.

Altman partly attributed the shortage to caution from memory manufacturers. For years, a DRAM producer “would invest $20 billion of CapEx to make $19 billion,” he said. Companies that nearly went bankrupt after overbuilding factories during past cycles have been slow to expand despite the prospect of large profits. Altman said he wants prices for energy, chips and the rest of the supply chain to decline. “If it doesn't go down, I'll be very sad,” he said, adding that falling prices require supply to grow.

The exchange extends a long-running dispute between Musk and Altman, who co-founded OpenAI with others in 2015 before Musk left in 2018. Musk sued OpenAI and Altman in 2024, alleging that they abandoned the organization’s founding nonprofit mission.

Musk’s latest legal challenge against OpenAI has also collapsed in court. According to NBC News, a California jury on Monday rejected Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, determining that Musk waited too long to bring claims alleging that OpenAI’s leadership improperly profited from the organization. In May, a federal jury in California found OpenAI, Altman and president Greg Brockman not liable on all claims. OpenAI’s lawyers had argued that the suit was motivated partly by competition after Musk launched rival AI company xAI in 2023.