He summarized the situation with a line he returned to repeatedly: “CSP profit equals storage capacity.”

The technology industry is increasingly talking about GPUs being central to AI infrastructure, but the limiting factor whichdecides what models you can run is actually memory.

In a wide-ranging interview, Phison CEO Pua Khein Seng, who invented the world's first single-chip USB flash drive, told TechRadar Pro the focus on compute has distracted from a more basic constraint which shows up everywhere, from laptops running local inference to hyperscalers building AI data centers.

“In AI models, the real bottleneck isn’t computing power - it’s memory,” Pua said. “If you don’t have enough memory, the system crashes.”

Compensating for ...