alt Hacker NewsThe memory business has always been extremely cyclical, and I doubt this time will be any different. The manufacturers have learnt this, and therefore to avoid boom followed by bust they try build for what they perceive to be longer-term more sustainable demand, not just knee-jerk increase demand to meet an immediate shortage.
The risk to any of the manufacturers, especially those with most market share, would seem to be if they are not all acting in sync. Micron's consumer brand, Crucial, had a great reputation, but now they have exited that business in favor or devoting all their capacity to currently higher margin products... will this come back to bite them later if they want to re-enter the consumer business?
What's different this time is that LLMs require orders of magnitude more memory than we could have ever used before. And I think it's getting obvious by now that inference will move to local compute, So everyone's laptops and phones would need a lot of memory.