AI Turns to Resource Hoarding: Bots Are Clearing the Shelves of RAM

Bots designed to buy up DDR5 standard RAM are attacking online stores six times more actively than regular customers. That's according to researchers at the Galileo group. The issue has been detected against the backdrop of a global memory module shortage, caused by manufacturers shifting their focus to producing more expensive solutions for AI servers.

According to Galileo, automated monitoring systems request pages with DDR5 modules every 6.5 seconds. In one documented case, bots made 50,000 requests for 91 product items in a single hour. Sellers are being forced to block millions of suspicious queries, with over 10 million requests being rejected at the peak of a single campaign.

The targets aren't just consumer-grade gaming kits; bots are tracking the availability of industrial modules from Micron and Apacer, as well as DIMM connectors from Amphenol and TE Connectivity. This suggests the automated systems are hunting for any available components suitable for building or maintaining server infrastructure.

The nature of the traffic leaves no doubt about its origin: requests are coming in 24/7 without the pauses typical of human behavior, sessions are limited to a single page view, there's no interaction with shopping carts or product comparisons, and when technical glitches occur, activity instantly drops to zero before just as sharply resuming.

From a market mechanics perspective, the situation mirrors the classic behavior of scalpers, but with a crucial difference: the bots aren't buying up memory to resell to people, but to power the very computing infrastructure that runs the algorithms themselves.

Have you run into a DDR5 shortage when shopping, or do you think this problem is overblown? Share your thoughts in the comments.