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It came for that PC you’re building and, if you’re planning on buying a car in the near future, it’s arrived to ruin that, too. The global memory chip shortage has already impacted wide swaths of consumer tech from smartphones to gaming consoles. Modern cars, with their sophisticated ADAS tech and self-driving capabilities, are anything but safe, as a Ford executive recently acknowledged during a global conference.
Ford Chief Financial Officer Sherry House was asked about the impact of constrained memory supply on carmaking at last week’s Wolfe Research summit on automotive tech and semiconductors in New York. Credit to Ford Authority for spotting a pertinent clip from the proceedings:
“So this is something that we’ve been actively managing,” House answered. “We do believe at this point in time that we have access to sufficient supply, but we are seeing pressure on pricing, and that has gone into our forward plan.”
Experts have been sounding the alarm about this crunch for months now, but to date, we haven’t heard many representatives from major automakers speak on it. “We are already seeing signs of panic buying [memory chips] within the auto sector,” one Counterpoint Research analyst was quoted by Bloomberg in a story published Monday.
That sure is a lot of screen in the Cadillac Escalade IQ. Would be a shame if AI data centers snapped up all the RAM it needs. General Motors
The world’s big three memory suppliers—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—have reallocated production capacity toward chips needed to power AI data centers (many of which don’t even exist yet). That’s resulted in a lot less stock for everything else that needs them, whether you’re talking about NAND storage or RAM. For reference, a 16GB RAM stick I spent $110 on for a PC I built seven years ago now costs $240. And that’s just for outdated tech—imagine what the shortage is doing to the latest and greatest components.
In an industry already beset by tariff upheaval and vanishing federal incentives, this latest chip shortage is due to simply raise prices at best, and gum up production lines at worst. Heck, it’ll probably do both. That’s usually how these things go.
Consider this blog post from 2023, which tallied up that the average vehicle at the time incorporated 90 GB of memory, across all of its modules. It was predicted that this amount would effectively triple by 2026. And, in a brutal twist of irony, that insight was relayed by Micron, the very memory supplier that recently announced a decision to shutter Crucial, its consumer RAM division, to funnel more silicon into data warehouses belonging to Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and so on.
There’s no telling how long this episode will last, or how much worse it’ll make car buying for the remainder of 2026. The ever-rising prices of new cars well before the memory crisis already rendered them more of a luxury product than ever before. Dealers have started steering shoppers toward used inventory in response, and even entertained fixing up and reselling salvage-titled cars. And now, there’s another chip shortage to contend with, as if you needed one more reason to go old and low-tech with your next vehicle purchase.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
