For the last year, covering PC hardware has felt like reporting from the apocalypse. We’ve all been living through “RAMageddon,” watching RAM prices rise by hundreds of dollars, and listening to industry CEOs warn us that supply chain relief wouldn’t arrive until 2028 .

But overnight, the tech landscape has started to violently shift. Look no further than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The guy who recently went on a podcast to tell you that local PC memory is a “terrible” allocation of scarce resources just executed a head-spinning PR pivot — playfully renaming his X account to “Ram Altman” and saying he's argued for local consumer memory "for a long time."

So why the sudden switch up? Well, you saw things start to play out over the past week. Financial markets have begun pushing back against the endless cash-pit of cloud AI data centers (with one exception: AMD, but we’ll get to that).

And now, the 2026 midterm results have introduced a massive new variable that may fundamentally alter the supply chain.…