{"id":6297,"date":"2026-04-02T22:16:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T22:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/04\/02\/google-research-touts-memory-compression-breakthrough-for-ai-processing-network-world\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T22:16:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T22:16:33","slug":"google-research-touts-memory-compression-breakthrough-for-ai-processing-network-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/04\/02\/google-research-touts-memory-compression-breakthrough-for-ai-processing-network-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Research touts memory-compression breakthrough for AI processing – Network World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Memory prices are falling, and stock prices of memory companies took a hit, following news from Google Research of a breakthrough that will greatly reduce the amount of memory needed for AI processing.
AI is notorious not only for processing requirements but also for high memory requirements. Vast amounts of memory are needed to process large language models and perform inferencing, which has led to a considerable shortage of available memory<\/a> as AI data centers have consumed all of the supply.
Enter Google Research and TurboQuant<\/a>, a compression algorithm for large language models and vector search engines that could greatly reduce AI memory requirements. According to Google, TurboQuant shrinks a major inference-memory bottleneck by reducing an AI model’s memory use by 6x, making it 8x faster with the same number of GPUs while maintaining zero loss in accuracy and “redefining AI efficiency.”
Google Reaseach announced<\/a> TurboQuant on X, and the news spread quickly. People began downloading the early release code, putting it to the test, and finding that it lived up to its promises.
Shares of memory chip makers dropped<\/a>. Micron stock fell more than $100 in two weeks, from $467 in mid-March to $366 just days later, for example. Although in fairness, the entire market was sputtering at the same time.
The release also had a considerable impact on memory pricing. Taiwan-based Economic Daily News reports<\/a> that the price of DDR5 memory sticks dropped by 15% to 30% in just the past few weeks, marking the first time memory prices have gone down in some time.
The last time the market witnessed a shakeup like this was China’s DeepSeek, but doubts emerged<\/a> quickly about its efficacy. Developers found DeepSeek’s efficiency gains required deep architectural decisions that had to be built in from the start. TurboQuant requires no retraining or fine-tuning. You just drop it straight into existing inference pipelines, at least in theory.
If it works in production systems with no retrofitting, then data center operators will get tremendous performance gains on existing hardware. Data center operators won’t have to throw hardware at the performance problem.
However, analysts urge caution before jumping to conclusions. “This is a research breakthrough, not a shipping product,” said Alex Cordovil<\/a>, research director for physical infrastructure at The Dell’Oro Group. “There’s often a meaningful gap between a published paper and real-world inference workloads.”
Also, Dell’Oro notes that efficiency gains in AI compute tend to get consumed by more demand, known as the Jevons paradox<\/a>. “Any freed-up capacity would likely be absorbed by frontier models expanding their capabilities rather than reducing their hardware footprint.”
Jim Handy<\/a>, president of Objective Analysis, agrees on that second part. “Hyperscalers won’t cut their spending – they’ll just spend the same amount and get more bang for their buck,” he said. “Data centers aren’t looking to reach a certain performance level and subsequently stop spending on AI. They’re looking to out-spend each other to gain market dominance. This won’t change that.”
Google plans to present a paper outlining TurboQuant at the ICLR conference in Rio de Janeiro<\/a> running from April 23 through April 27.<\/p>\n

Andy Patrizio is a freelance journalist based in southern California who has covered the computer industry for 20 years and has built every x86 PC he\u2019s ever owned, laptops not included.
Andy writes the Data Center Explorer<\/a> blog for Network World. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Tom’s Guide, Wired, Dr. Dobbs Journal, Tech Target<\/a>, Business Insider<\/a>, and Data Center Knowledge<\/a>. Earlier in his career, he held editorial positions at IT publications like InternetNews, PC Week and InformationWeek.
Andy holds a BA in Journalism from the University of Rhode Island.<\/p>\n

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Memory prices are falling, and stock prices of memory companies took a hit, following news from Google Research of a breakthrough that will greatly reduce the amount of memory needed for AI processing.AI is notorious not only for processing requirements but also for high memory requirements. Vast amounts of memory are needed to process large […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6298,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}