It’s been a big week for AI haters. OpenAI’s video platform Sora shut down on March 24 (following a report that it was allegedly losing $1 million every day), some DDR5 RAM prices are currently down (a development which has been tied to the announcement of Google’s “extreme compression” tech TurboQuant), and an AI Olaf robot just died in front of Disneyland Paris visitors—and hey, it’s only Tuesday!
Yet despite all this, the story that’s seemingly getting the most traction among the anti-AI crowd concerns stock prices. Exciting segue, I know. Over the past month, all of the top players in the RAM manufacturing industry have seen significant decreases in their stock valuations, and many are treating the news as the first real sign that the AI bubble may be set to finally burst.
“Turns out Sam Altman ‘buying up’ 40% of DRAM wafers was actually him writing Letters of Intent,” wrote YouTuber Hardware Canucks in a post on X. “Letters he supposedly had / has no intention of converting to actual purchases now. And memory manufacturers are just getting DUMPED on today.”
Valve’s Steam Machine price could be saved thanks to collapsing RAM prices pic.twitter.com/jwhmVZ9f2X
— Skins.com (@skinscom) March 30, 2026
For the most part, this is true. As of this writing, Samsung Electronics’ stock price is down 19.68 percent this month, Micron Technology’s is down 20.72 percent, and SK Hynix is down 14.06 percent. But is this truly the beginning of the end for the AI sector, and will RAM prices continue to dip as a result? To properly answer that question, we need to break down every factor at play here.
Let’s start with Hardware Canucks’ post. The “Letters of Intent” part is multifaceted, but it starts back in September of 2025. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix signed letters of intent with OpenAI, stating that the RAM manufacturers intended to supply the ChatGPT developer with roughly 40 percent of the entire global output of DRAM for use in its “Stargate Project” data centers.
There’s a lot to go over here, but the part that’s seemingly gotten lost in the sauce is that a letter of intent is a precursor to a formal agreement. In short, the DRAM wasn’t actually purchased; OpenAI signed a non-legally-binding document stating that they intended to purchase it. It’s important to note here that this announcement had a huge effect on the stock valuations of RAM manufacturers. For example, from September 5, 2025 to March 5, 2026, SK Hynix’s stock valuation shot up by a whopping 238 percent.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI and Oracle had supposedly cancelled the expansion of the Stargate Project’s datacenters in Abilene, Texas. According to Bloomberg’s report, this was due to OpenAI’s financing woes and its “often-changing demand forecasting.” In a post on X on March 9, Oracle (which partnered with OpenAI for the Stargate Project) stated that “recent media activity about the Abilene site are false and incorrect.”
Recent media activity about the Abilene site are false and incorrect. First, Crusoe and Oracle are operating in lockstep to deliver one of the world’s largest AI Data centers in Abilene at record-breaking pace. Two buildings are completely operational and the rest of the campus…
— Oracle (@Oracle) March 9, 2026
Turns out, Bloomberg was right on the money—at least where OpenAI is concerned. Crusoe Energy Systems, the AI infrastructure developers behind the Stargate Project’s construction, confirmed on March 27 that Microsoft is building a new AI factory in Abilene, Texas, which will be “located adjacent to Crusoe’s existing Abilene AI factory infrastructure.” According to AP News, Microsoft’s new factory is “on the same tract of land,” situated “right next to where Crusoe has been building an even larger computing campus for OpenAI and Oracle.” Crusoe is skirting around outright confirming it, but the timing and location more than implies that Microsoft is leasing the space that OpenAI no longer wants (or, rather, the space they can no longer take).
With all this in mind, surely this means that OpenAI’s Stargate Project is in some serious trouble, right? It’s not quite that simple, unfortunately. Microsoft and OpenAI signed a multiyear-long partnership deal back in 2019, which, in 2025, Microsoft confirmed had been (partially) extended up until 2032. Microsoft is entitled to 20 percent of OpenAI’s revenue until said agreement expires, so it’s very much in the company’s interest to make sure that OpenAI doesn’t kick the bucket. Microsoft hasn’t just moved in next door to its competitor; it’s leased land next to its business partner, and likely eased some of OpenAI’s logistical and financial issues in the process.
Still, it’s another example of OpenAI’s longstanding habit of writing checks that can’t be cashed. OpenAI reportedly lost roughly $5 billion in 2024, somewhere between $8 billion and $12 billion in 2025 and, according to The Information, it’s projected to lose $14 billion in 2026. The funny thing is that these losses are just a drop in the bucket because, as of 2025, OpenAI owes almost $100 billion in loans.
There’s also the matter of Nvidia’s “strategic partnership” with OpenAI. On September 22, 2025, Nvidia announced that it would be investing up to “$100 billion in OpenAI” in installments. Nvidia planned to progressively invest this money to help “OpenAI to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers.” It’s an oddly back-to-front deal, but Nvidia was essentially giving OpenAI money to buy Nvidia’s microchips. But, once again, the deal was simply a “letter of intent.”
Nvidia’s deal was technically separate from Samsung and SK Hynix’s deal with OpenAI, just made in the same timeframe. I say “was” because, after months of speculation, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, all but confirmed on March 4 that the deal had fallen through. As reported by Reuters, Huang stated during the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference that Nvidia’s previous $30 billion investment in OpenAI was likely to be the last time it could “invest in a consequential company like this.” This is because OpenAI is reportedly set to become a publicly traded company in 2026, which means Nvidia’s “letter of intent” deal will no longer be fulfilled. That means that the $100 billion total investment, and the microchips, are no longer on the table. There’s a good reason OpenAI is often referred to as a “black hole,” as far as investments are concerned.
Ok, but now we’re exactly back to where we were four paragraphs ago; why doesn’t this mean that RAM prices are going to fall? By all accounts, OpenAI is set for a make-or-break 2026, and if it breaks, those unfulfilled letters of intent, which already aren’t legally binding anyway, will release hundreds of thousands of RAM modules into the world…right?
The problem is that OpenAI’s letters of intent aren’t entirely to blame for the dips in stock valuations. While the likes of Bloomberg and Fast Company note that investors’ AI-bubble-related fears are fueling the downward turn, Google’s TurboQuant announcement and the US-Iran war are also being factored into the dip.
But here’s the catch: according to Morgan Stanley’s analyst Joseph Moore (per Investor’s Business Daily), all of these factors, from TurboQuant to the AI bubble popping, aren’t indicative of a decrease in RAM demand. It’s just a classic case of buy low, sell high, and many investors are likely selling pre-dip, so they can buy during the dip.
“We see the recent sell-off as a healthy pricing in of durability concerns — capex, demand destruction, productivity, etc. — and yet we see the strength as more durable than the market thinks, with memory supply remaining a gating factor for AI,” Moore revealed. “But our view is that looking for sell signals from prior cycles misses the point.”
“[Memory] shortages are intensifying and customers are prepaying for large-volume deals given conviction that these shortages will be sustainable,” Moore continued. “Our take, after talking to industry folks on this today, is that this is an evolutionary development, with basically no surprises for memory.”
The Microsoft/OpenAI datacenter lease in Abilene, Texas, is an example of this in a microcosm. Let’s say OpenAI goes bankrupt next month. What happens then? Do all of the microchips and RAM that have already been purchased, and are already housed within said datacenters, just get thrown into landfills, free for the taking? No. They get purchased by a bigger fish, probably for less than what OpenAI bought them for in the first place, and all these letters of intent will get passed on. As far as the shareholders are concerned, these RAM prices have to be maintained for as long as humanly possible.
This doesn’t end with OpenAI. Its demise doesn’t mark the final chapter in the AI bubble. The vultures will swarm and pick its carcass clean, and then a new AI overlord will take its place. And then they’ll own all the RAM. There are already half a dozen frontrunners, set to cannibalize its corpse. Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot—the list, sadly, goes on and on and on.
Sundar Pichai, the head of Google parent firm Alphabet, stated in an interview with the BBC that, should the AI bubble pop, “no company is going to be immune, including us.” To these AI investors, there is too much money and too much risk involved in letting that happen. With that in mind, instead, we’d probably be wiser to consider OpenAI’s potential downfall as a first chapter of sorts. A stepping stone, or, rather, the first in a line of dominoes.
