BOISE, ID — In a grim forecast for the future of artificial intelligence, Micron Technology announced Wednesday that a worldwide RAM shortage will force companies to run cutting-edge neural networks on whatever scrap memory, napkins, or random brainwaves they can scrounge until at least 2027.

“We encourage startups to get creative—tape together old USB sticks, borrow grandma’s iPad 2, or just daydream about having memory,” said Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra. “We’re in this together. I personally just ran ChatGPT on a post-it note. It only took 16 hours to say ‘Hello.’”

With AI demand surging, data centers belonging to OpenAI, Meta, and Google are reportedly swapping out servers for Etch-A-Sketches and abacuses. “We’ve replaced half our NVIDIA GPUs with some LEGOs and hope for the best,” said Microsoft engineer Tina Ludd, frantically soldering RAM chips to a potato. “Sometimes Bing remembers my name. That’s progress.”

Consumers are also affected. “My Alexa just told me she’d need a week to process my playlist request,” said Idaho resident Greg Falwell, whose smart speaker is now powered by three AA batteries and an 8MB SD card from 2004. “She’s doing her best, bless her circuits.”

Despite record revenues of $13.64 billion last quarter, Micron executives promise things could get worse. “By 2027, RAM will be so rare it’ll be used as currency,” predicted Micron analyst Dirk Nand. “Some say love is priceless. I say it’s a 32-gig DDR5 stick.”