Google disassembles retired servers to recycle DDR4 in response to memory shortages

Google's Senior Director of Supply Chain Infrastructure, Nikhil Cherian, revealed that to overcome memory bottlenecks, Google is developing software and hardware solutions and dismantling retired servers to recycle DDR4 components to establish an internal recycling supply chain. Google has designed special hardware adapters to connect the previous generation DDR4 to the new generation of AI servers while importing retired servers to remove their DDR4 modules for recycling.

Cherian stated that the AI industry has rapidly shifted from being compute-constrained to memory-constrained, with high-performance memory accounting for about 75% of the bill of materials cost for a given AI server. A Goldman Sachs report indicated that memory prices will continue to rise in the third quarter, with personal computer DRAM prices expected to increase by 18% to 23% and server DRAM prices expected to rise by 13% to 18%. Trendforce data shows that in August, the spot market prices for DDR4 8GB and DDR5 8GB rose to $142 and $133, respectively.

The two TPU ASICs launched by Google this year have been optimized for memory design, claiming to reduce memory demand to one-sixth of the original. The TPU8i chip features a dedicated layered memory design that relies on a high-speed DDR5 memory architecture to perform host-level tasks, with each chip equipped with 288GB of HBM3e high-bandwidth memory.