The AI boom is about to claim some unexpected casualties. Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng just delivered a stark warning - companies could start dying in the second half of 2026 if they can't secure enough RAM. Speaking in a televised interview with Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, the memory controller chief painted a grim picture of a supply chain stretched to breaking point by artificial intelligence's insatiable appetite for memory chips.
The tech industry's RAM crisis just got a face and a timeline. Phison, one of the world's dominant makers of SSD controller chips, is now sounding the alarm through its CEO Pua Khein-Seng - and the message is blunt: some companies won't survive 2026.
In a televised interview with Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, Pua agreed that companies may need to slash their product lines in the second half of this year. More dramatically, he acknowledged that some firms will simply die if they can't secure the memory components they need. The interview, conducted entirely in Chinese, was confirmed by The Verge through native speakers who verified machine-translated summaries that have been ricocheting through industry channels.
This isn't just another supply chain hiccup. Phison sits at a critical junction in the memory ecosystem, providing the controller chips that manage data flow in SSDs and flash storage devices. When its CEO talks about component shortages, he's speaking from a vantage point that sees orders from manufacturers across the entire electronics industry.
The root cause? AI's explosive growth is gobbling up memory capacity at unprecedented rates. Data centers building out infrastructure for large language models and AI training need massive amounts of high-bandwidth memory - the same DRAM chips that go into everything from smartphones to laptops to gaming consoles. As hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon race to expand their AI capabilities, they're outbidding consumer electronics makers for limited memory supply.
