There is an unexpected victim of the rise in RAM memory prices: the very modern connected cars

Which what’s happening with the RAM memories is making one thing clear: the best time to buy memory modules is yesterday. The price increase is so extraordinary which is already affecting other classic components of our PCs such as SSD units or graphics cards. However, the crisis that these components are generating goes further. Much further.

Data centers devour memory. The AI ​​fever, we already know very well, has generated a voracious hunger not only for cutting-edge AI chips, but also for RAM and HBM memories that accompany these chips. As indicated in The Wall Street Journaldata centers (both conventional and those dedicated to AI) will consume more than 70% of the high-end memory chips that manufacturers produce in 2026. And if they could take more, they would take them.

This is not (only) about PCs or mobiles. It is evident that the first affected by this problem are conventional desktop and laptop computers, as well as our mobile devices. Hundreds of millions of them are sold every year and they all have a certain amount of RAM that is now more expensive than ever. The shock wave is already causing other components such as SSD drives or graphics cards affected, but in reality memory chips are everywhere. And above all, in one.

From TV to car. The frenetic rise in memory prices is certainly going to affect other segments that we had not thought about soon. Of course it will do so on other consumer electronic devices, and this certainly includes Smart TVs, which They have their own processor, memory and storage to offer us its functions. But the problem may be even more critical for cars, which for years were already computers with wheels and which are now even better and more powerful computers (and with more memory) with wheels.

Memories of all kinds. Although car electronic systems have traditionally used RAM, the latest in most cases was not needed. But that was in the cars of a few years ago, because the arrival especially of the electric car and the fever for screens in our vehicles has made these needs different. Now our cars need various types of memory, but in some cases those modules are as good (or better) than the ones we have in our cell phones and computers.

The ECUs. A modern car makes use of so-called ECUs (Electronic Control Units) for issues such as controlling the transmission, the airbag system or the engine itself. It is normal for them to have between 50 and 150 of these control units or microcontrollers, and almost all of them contain RAM for temporary data and a ROM for firmware and software.

Infotainment systems. The most obvious component that surely comes to mind as that “car computer” is the infotainment system, which usually consists of a touch screen, navigation functions, support for CarPlay and Android Auto systems, and voice assistants. Although in many cars these systems use 1 GB or 2 GB of DRAM memory, there are more modern cars that They reach 4 GB and even 8 GB of LPDDR4 memory. And if we talk about some manufacturers like BYD or NIO, there are models in which They use 16 GB of LPDDR5 memory. The Ford SYNC 5 system, for example, is based on a Qualcomm SoC with 16 GB of RAM.

Driving assistance requires memory. In addition to these components, there are others that also require the use of RAM. Advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS) allow you to activate functions such as adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, automatic emergency braking or parking assistant. And to achieve this they use RAM with high bandwidth, which allows working with real-time images and processing of sensor signals. Samsung knows this well and in fact manufactures modules specifically oriented to this market. Tesla’s well-known autopilot hardware, Hardware 4 (currently used) makes use of 16 GB of RAMFor example.

Micron already warned. In December 2023 Micron already indicated that “a car needs more memory than a (space) rocket.” The firm, an absolute protagonist in the field of RAM memory module manufacturing, indicated how in 2023 the average vehicle used 90 GB between RAM and NAND, but in 2026 that figure was estimated to be 278 GB and would reach 2 TB in high-end vehicles. That was good news for it and other manufacturers, and even then it pointed to how “generative AI is transforming automotive.” What they probably didn’t realize is that this revolution was going to need many data centers, and those data centers were going to need a lot of memory. And this is where we are.

In Xataka | “Not a phone, it’s a car”: Volkswagen believes that screens in cars are going too far