There aren't enough memory chips to go around.

So what does that mean for our digital memories?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

As tech companies rush to build data centers to power their AI models, they're eating up power, money, and also memory.

Specifically, memory chips. The research firm IDC says demand from data centers has driven up prices for these chips and that we're dealing with an unprecedented memory chip shortage.

That has knock-on effects for other devices that need these chips, including smartphones, PCs,

and external hard drives.

The company Western Digital said on its most recent earnings call that it's pretty much sold

out of hard drives already for the year.

This is causing problems for anyone who wants to preserve data, including those who do it for a living.

Linda Todditch leads the company Digital Bedrock.

She works to preserve the archives of museums, libraries, movie and TV studios.

I asked her how the memory shortage is affecting her work.

So I went out and I bought up, whatever hard drives I could find that would go into our servers.

So my concern with this, the chip storage, the hard drive storage, basically the marketplace is

tilting in favor of the hyperscalers. We're going to have to rely on the hyperscalers to store our

data and to process it is just the way it's going because they are also then

controlling the means to store the data. So this is kind of like a more Uber kind of concern

that I have. What are your clients saying about the memory shortage? The media clients are aware

of it because that's that's really the community that first heard about it. Other people are only just now starting to learn about it.

I presented at a museum event on a panel on digital art preservation,

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