Context Drought: Global HBM/DRAM Shortage to Hold LLM Context Windows at 1M Tokens for 5–10 Years

Latent Space·high signal

Latent Space AINews reports that context windows won't meaningfully exceed 1M tokens for years due to the global memory shortage — insufficient HBM and DRAM to serve large contexts at inference scale. SK Hynix has sold out HBM production through 2027; DRAM supply is growing only 16% YoY while AI infrastructure demand accelerates. Builder implication: the HBM constraint is structural, not temporary — architect persistent memory systems now rather than waiting for context windows to solve the problem.