Don’t get me wrong it’ll have to pop eventually, but I see it as very likely the US government will pump billions of taxpayer money into the industry to keep it going long after it should have failed. The US is basically guaranteed to go into a pretty bad recession when it pops now given basically all US GDP growth is from AI currently.

Cancelling capacity is a good point that I missed, though there’ll still be the wave of non-AI but non-consumer demand that’s been pent-up, so it’s still not going straight back to the consumer.

The inventory thing isn’t going to play out like that simply because the stuff being made is incompatible with consumer hardware. People running data centres might be able to do some cheaper server upgrades, but you’re not going to be putting HBM memory and SXM5 GPUs into any consumer motherboard

3-4 months isn’t happening even if there’s a catastrophic, all-pops-at-once, event tomorrow. And honestly, given everything, I think the best we’re seeing is a negligible drop at least a couple of years away, and that’ll become the new norm.

Oh another one I forgot, Bezos’ post-AI-bubble plan seems to be that consumers only get thin clients and rent compute from the cloud. I’d put money on AWS buying up the majority of spoils of unsold AI inventory, and fab capacity shifting to serve that. It’s now very much in Bezos’ interest to make sure consumer hardware prices never come down, so people are left with no other choice.