The memory shortage has become a political problem in Washington. Now the chip industry has a message for the Trump administration: leave the market alone, or the squeeze gets worse.
The warning came in a letter from SEMI, a semiconductor industry group, to senior US officials. Any attempt to fix the shortage by steering prices or production would deepen it, the group said, as Bloomberg reported.
The crunch traces back to the AI boom, which is swallowing memory chips faster than makers can produce them.
Hands off the market
SEMI’s argument is blunt. “Interventions that distort pricing or capacity decisions risk prolonging the demand downturn,” the group wrote, in a copy seen by Bloomberg. It wants the opposite approach. Let companies keep signing long-term supply deals with customers, and extend tax breaks that lift US output.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
The stakes are high for its members. The three big memory makers all belong to SEMI: Micron in Idaho, plus SK Hynix and Samsung of South Korea. Their shares have soared as AI demand outstrips supply.
A pocketbook problem
The politics are shifting because the shortage now reaches ordinary shoppers. Memory sits in everything from cars to laptops, and prices are climbing across the board. Even decades-old memory standards have jumped. Apple and Microsoft have both raised prices on popular gadgets, which is exactly what worries politicians eyeing voters’ wallets.
SEMI has a fix for that too. Rather than capping prices, it wants Congress to soften the blow with consumer tax breaks on phones and laptops. The group was careful to thank the administration for its support of the chip sector.
The China question
The letter lands in the middle of a louder fight. Apple is lobbying the same officials for permission to buy memory from two Chinese firms on a Pentagon blacklist. SEMI’s letter names no Chinese suppliers. But it went to the very people Apple has been pressing: the Treasury, Defence, Commerce and State secretaries.
Not everyone in Washington wants a light touch. One Republican senator, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, has urged the Commerce Secretary to put American buyers first. He warned of a car-industry hit like the one seen during the pandemic.
Years, not months
The hard truth is time. SEMI says memory capacity should grow about 19 per cent a year, yet AI demand will still eclipse it. New factories take years to build. Until they arrive, the mismatch keeps pushing prices up. For European shoppers, the warning rhymes with one already made in Britain.
Currys expects phones, laptops and TVs to cost more later this year. The industry’s message to politicians is simple. You cannot regulate more chips into existence.
Staff who use AI can end up with more to do, not less.
Think carefully about the tools you’re using and why.
Adopt a set of standards and refine your outputs.
The promise of productivity boosts from AI can come with an unwelcome side order of stress. Harvard Business Review found that AI doesn’t reduce work; it intensifies it, leading to cognitive fatigue and unsustainable hours.
While the common perception is that AI can help reduce workloads, allowing employees to focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks, HBR’s research found that staff using AI worked more quickly and often ended up with more to do, not less.
Ankur Anand, group CIO at tech recruiter Harvey Nash, said professionals who want to avoid cognitive fatigue must understand how to use AI effectively and its potential risks.
“That focus will help to reduce the noise around the workload that AI creates,” he told ZDNET, suggesting that many people have unrealistic expectations about the productivity boost that AI will provide.
“Many organizations are telling their people, ‘We want to understand how you’re making an impact with AI,'” he said. “But these professionals are not empowered, which means that using AI adds a lot of pressure, because they need to prove themselves on their own terms.”
If you’re going to make the most of AI at work, then you’re going to have to find an effective balance between completing tasks quickly and producing high-quality work.
Here’s how the experts believe professionals can ensure they reap the benefits, not the problems, of AI — and they suggest that you’ll need to focus on three core areas: tools, guidelines, and outputs.
Limit your toolset
Alex Read, senior enterprise product manager for data at energy provider EDF UK, told ZDNET that the best way for professionals to reap the benefits, not the challenges, of AI is to be uber-focused on tools that help you produce value in your roles.
While there are thousands of potential AI-enabled services on the market, Read said sensible professionals limit their horizons.
In his own role, for example, Read focuses on how AI can help him build a data platform and update information accurately, efficiently, and productively: “Anything outside of that scope is noise for me.”
That sentiment resonated with Nick Pearson, CIO at technology specialist Ricoh Europe, who told ZDNET it’s important to take a step back and think carefully about how an AI tool can help you produce value in your role.
“If you think about the phrase ‘gen AI,’ the tech is very good, by definition, at generating outputs,” he said. “I could go to bed in the evening, set the model to work, and we could have four new IT strategies produced overnight.”
However, quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. Pearson suggested it’s important to focus on AI’s blind spots, particularly as most models are trained on preexisting content.
“AI can’t inspire people, per se; it can’t naturally create something new, because it’s actually quite recursive,” he said.
“And the judgment you have to put in sometimes, on top of everything else, whether it be an ethical or a capability judgment, is not there automatically in the technology.”
It’s in this gap, said Pearson, that human experts play a critical role: “We’re toying with that concern as an organization and saying, ‘Where does AI really play an important role, versus where are we upskilling people in areas that AI probably won’t play for a long time?'”
To correct this issue, HBR said companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that help professionals ensure they use AI in a constrained but productive manner.
At EDF UK, Read is part of an internal AI Center of Excellence in enterprise IT, which enables policy for the effective use of AI across the wider organization.
In addition to Read, who contributes input from a data-use perspective, the group includes other tech representatives, such as the firm’s senior manager of AI, principal software engineer, and principal solution architect.
“The remit of this center is to make sure that, when the federated business units are looking to build, develop, and deploy AI services, they have platforms, guidance, best practices, architectural assets, and materials to guide them on how to safely and efficiently adopt AI and operationalize it at scale,” he said.
Some of the key themes the center considers when assessing AI tools are scalability and reusability, ensuring a proposed service doesn’t replicate one already in use.
“All new tools and services related to AI will go through that hopper and funnel to understand scope and ensure the security, regulatory, and ethical side of things are understood,” he said, suggesting that all professionals should use their organization’s pre-existing guidelines to foster an appropriate exploitation of emerging tech.
“The benefit that guided approach brings is that it allows us to be clear in our messaging around what AI services can be used, how they’re used from a use-case perspective, and ultimately, what personas are allowed to use them.”
Louise Newbury-Smith, head of UK&I at technology specialist Zoom, told ZDNET that one way to ensure your outputs are constrained is to focus on prompting.
“Use simple amendments to be specific, such as ‘Give me the top three things with the biggest impact.’ That approach should guide your prompt, rather than saying, ‘Give me everything you know about this topic.'”
Newbury-Smith said the successful use of AI is all about being smart about how it’s exploited, and that effectiveness comes down to enablement and engagement. If a prompt yields too much information, refine it until you get what you need. She said this should still be faster than trying to get answers without AI.
The basic message for professionals is that effective applications of AI are all about you staying in the loop, said Bernhard Seiser, vice president of digital, data, and IT at AOP Health.
Think before you use AI, and think again before you push your outputs around the organization.
“It doesn’t help the business if you get AI-generated emails that are many pages long, and then you need ChatGPT to summarize the text,” he told ZDNET.
Seiser said that while there are certain tasks generative AI is good at and worth using for, in the end, “you need to use your brain.”
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
