Not data, RAM is new oil and Sridhar Vembu rightly warns it is making life expensive

There is a cliche often repeated in India: data is new oil. In 2026 we are learning just how wrong it is. It's not data that is the new scarce, and yet essential, commodity. Instead, it is RAM and, as Zoho boss Sridhar Vembu has noted, it is doing to the world what oil has done for years.

In Short

• Not data, but RAM is the new scarce resource like oil
• The rising price of RAM is making the world expensive
• Recently, Zoho chief scientist Sridhar Vembu highlighted it

Earlier this week Zoho chief scientist and noted technologist Sridhar Vembu said something that many are feeling but are not yet commenting on: the crazy rise in computer memory prices in the last one year is beginning to pinch companies hard. And not just phone companies, or laptop companies that use the RAM in their products. But virtually all businesses because, as Donald Trump once famously quipped, “wow! everything is computer” nowadays.

And if everything is computer — in other words digital — nowadays, then crazy RAM prices are beginning to impact everything, making it difficult for everyone. Vembu was blunt and clear in his words as he quoted a report that highlighted a 500 per cent increase in RAM prices in just one year. “Memory prices, along with AI token prices have made business very difficult. We have held back from raising prices but it is becoming hard,” he wrote.

He is not the first tech leader to say this and he wouldn’t be the last. This year from Apple CEO Tim Cook to virtually every tech company CEO has highlighted the squeeze that rising RAM prices are putting on the world. The effect is beginning to look something like the “oil shock” that the world used to witness decades ago, with inflation across the world rising on the back of demand-supply mismatch in the oil market and everything becoming expensive.

In India, given that we are a nation of over a billion people and hence generate a lot of data, there is a cliche: data is new oil. We love to say that because we believe the data we generate has value. It probably does. But so far we haven’t seen that value.

In 2026, we are discovering that it is not data that is new oil. Instead, it is RAM. And it fits like a perfect metaphor.

Look at it this way: Oil for the last 100 years has been something that has moved the physical world. It is the dense energy inside the black liquid gold that has powered the world since the first oil wells were dug in the deserts of Arabia. But the world of 2026 is not just the physical world. It is also a digital world, and in the digital world the bits and bytes move through RAM.

RAM was plenty in supply, and rather low in the hierarchy of cutting-edge technologies, until 2022 or so. But then as AI arrived on the scene, the world of technology as well as RAM changed. AI needs lots and lots of fast computing power. And it needs gigabits and gigabits of extremely fast RAM in which it can live and function, to put it metaphorically. Without truckloads of RAM, AI doesn’t work. ChatGPT, Claude, Kimi and Gemini, they all guzzle RAM like the old train engines would drink oil. RAM is suddenly a precious commodity that is also essential and in low supply.

Just like oil supply issues have a tendency to act as an inflationary force in an economy, in the digital economy — in other words, the current world — RAM is doing the same. And hence Vembu’s stark words that reveal the reality of almost all businesses nowadays.

Everyone needs phones, servers, computers, and AI tools, to do business nowadays. And if all the IT infrastructure is now expensive because RAM prices have gone up 500 per cent, then the cost of doing business too is up significantly. Now one is untouched from the mayhem that expensive RAM has unleashed in the world.

For example, take a look at your dentist and the tools he uses. Somewhere among the drills and probes, he also probably has a couple of MacBooks on which he processes and analyses the patient data. The MacBook Pro that he could buy a few months ago for Rs 1,69,900 now costs him Rs 2,39,900. That is an increase of Rs 70,000 in just one go. He will have no option but to increase the prices of services that he offers.

This is just one example. The predicament of tech companies like Zoho, which provide IT infrastructure for their clients, is particularly worrisome. It is not just the price of RAM that has gone up. All items that go into a data centre, from storage to computer chips to even the copper cables, are now more expensive.

The increase in cost of doing business has to be adjusted somewhere. Companies can strap their belts tighter and try to live with lowered margins. But even then the question is: for how long? The RAM makers like HK Hynix and Micron are saying that supply crunch would last until 2030. Some Chinese RAM makers are trying to ramp up supply, but Chinese RAM is tricky for two reasons.

One, China itself needs all the RAM it can make. And two, the US doesn't want global companies using Chinese RAM, just like it doesn’t want the rest of the world using Iranian or Russian oil. Sigh! The parallels exist here too. In other words, in 2026 RAM is indeed new oil. And to deal with the crunch, India might have to do something similar to what it has done for years in dealing with the oil supply crunch — that is getting into the game and then be strategic about how its companies are going to get access to RAM and vital computer components in the coming months and years.

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