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The most likely direct response is not new capacity, it's older capacity running at full tilt (given the now higher margins) to produce more mature technology with lower requirements on fabrication (such as DDR3/4, older Flash storage tech, etc.) and soak up demand for these. DDR5/GDDR/HBM/etc. prices will still be quite high, but alternatives will be available.

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> produce more mature technology ... DDR3/4

...except current peak in demand is mostly driven by build-out of AI capacity.

Both inference and training workloads are often bottlenecked on RAM speed, and trying to shoehorn older/slower memory tech there would require non-trivial amount of R&D to go into widening memory bus on CPU/GPU/NPUs, which is unlikely to happen - those are in very high demand already.

Even if AI stuff does really need DDR5, there must be lots of other applications that would ideally use DDR5 but can make do with DDR3/4 if there's a big difference in price

I mean, AI is currently hyped, so the most natural and logical assumption is that AI drives these prices up primarily. We need compensation from those AI corporations. They cost us too much.

It is still an assumption.

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