Memory Is the Lynchpin of the IT Industry, and Doubly So for AI
The Next Platform, Thursday, October 8th, 2026
Memory has eclipsed compute as the control point of the IT industry in the AI era, per Gartner chip revenue data.
The Next Platform's Timothy Prickett Morgan argues that for decades CPUs and later GPUs were the focal point of systems, with memory, storage and I/O treated as secondary and often skimped on.
Machine learning, generative AI and agentic AI have moved memory front and center, eclipsing compute as the control point in most of the IT sector with surprising speed.
Using Gartner's breakdown of memory versus non-memory chip revenue, he notes the semiconductor market nearly doubled between 2025 and 2026, with growth forecast to slow in 2027, and estimates the split between DRAM and NAND flash.