AI has changed how the entire IT industry makes money, turning software from something that can be distributed almost for free into something that burns electricity, chips, and memory for every token produced.
As a result, profits are flowing from internet companies to semiconductors. Within semiconductors, the real bottleneck for the token factory is no longer just GPU compute, but HBM capacity × HBM bandwidth.
As long as that architecture does not change, memory will go from being a “cyclical industry” to a “cyclical industry with growth.”
On the demand side, the infrastructure buildout is being stretched much longer than the internet era by the product of two exponentials: “more users × more usage per person.”