Memory shortages have become the biggest bottleneck for putting AI to work, bad news for makers of on-device and edge AI, but good news for companies holding memory and flash supply.

• Phison CEO K.S. Pua said that if AI is to genuinely run on devices, DRAM is something money cannot always buy — and even when you can buy it, you cannot always sell what you make with it.
• He said bluntly that almost the entire industry is suffering over DRAM, "it seems only Acer isn't suffering," responding to Acer's Jason Chen, who had said earlier that mainstream PC memory was not in across-the-board shortage.
• Phison's answer is to pair its own software with SSDs so that AI models can run even with very little DRAM, an approach already validated on AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm platforms.
• Pua also assured partner ASRock Industrial on the spot that it would get as much flash memory as it needs, effectively signalling that nearly a year of shortage pressure is beginning to ease.
• On the same day, AMD's market capitalisation topped US$1 trillion for the first time, and a record high in MediaTek's share price drove a strong rally in Taiwan stocks, with foreign investors turning net buyers as funds flowed back into electronics.

Outlook: memory prices and supply will remain the biggest variable in AI hardware, and whoever can get AI running on less DRAM will be first to capture the edge market.