Artificial intelligence chips devour memory like nothing before. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, stacks wafers into towering structures that feed data to GPUs at blistering speeds. But that hunger creates shortages. Prices climb. Your next phone or laptop pays the price. SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won laid it bare in March. “The global chip wafer shortage is likely to last until 2030, with artificial intelligence demand continuing to outpace the supply,” he said, as reported by Reuters . The current gap hovers above 20%. AI systems guzzle HBM, burning through wafers faster than factories can spin them out. Building extra capacity? That takes four to five years, he added. Fast forward to this month. Global DRAM supply will cover just 60% of demand through 2027, according to Nikkei Asia . Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—the big three controlling over 95% of production—shift lines to HBM. One HBM bit costs three times the wafer space of standard DRAM. Consumer gadgets get scraps.…