Altman: Large DRAM in personal PCs is problematic
OpenAI's CEO said on John Collison's podcast that memory is better pooled in data centers running around the clock than spread across individual machines.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that putting large amounts of DRAM in personal PCs is problematic, arguing that memory spread across individual machines would be used only about 5% of the time overall. He made the comments on a podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, as reported by gamebusiness.jp.
Altman said that in a supply-constrained situation, it is more efficient to concentrate DRAM in data centers that run around the clock and are shared by many users.
On the same episode, Altman discussed data center construction, in-house chip development and automating manufacturing with robots. The conversation also covered PHP vulnerabilities, sandboxing models during training and recent OpenAI model results in mathematics research.
The episode was published on YouTube.
Earlier interest in local setups
In October 2025, when local LLM setups gained attention, the Mac Studio became popular as a quiet machine with large, fast unified memory, and Apple's supply could not keep up.
Quick answers
What did Sam Altman say about DRAM in personal PCs?
He said having large amounts of DRAM in personal PCs is problematic, arguing that such memory would be used only about 5% of the time overall.
Where did Altman make the comments?
On a podcast hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, published on YouTube.