> What specifically happened in June to set this off?

Tariffs implemented by this administration:

  "Inflation has begun to show the first signs of tariff 
  pass-through," said Ellen Zentner, chief economic 
  strategist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. "While 
  services inflation continues to moderate, the acceleration 
  in tariff-exposed goods in June is likely the first of 
  greater price pressures to come. The Fed will want to hold 
  steady as it awaits more data."[0]

OpenAI bought up a big chunk of global DRAM production:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...

"Waves hands at AI/LLMs"

The problem is that training these models and using these models has required exponentially increasing amounts of memory.

ChatGPT has existed for years and in those years it's userbase and model size has increased tremendously. Not to mention the fact that a lot of competitors have sprung up in the wake of GPT. Including the likes of cloud based open model hosting services.

Perhaps some tariff shenanigans?