The memory makers will not expand demand drastically. It is in the nature of their business to keep the market under-supplied, otherwise the following oversupply will kill them. Instead, supply is just rerouted from less profitable segments such as mobile and personal computing.

It sure looks like Sam Altman's masterful gambit to corner the memory market has had unforeseen consequences.

What’s the lifespan/refurbishability of the capex elements like the “GPU” modules or even the DRAM soldered into them?

I wonder if we will see an adoption of alternative floating point formats. IEEE floats are notoriously terrible at lower widths (<= 16 bits). Floating point formats such as posits do much better at 16 or 8 bits. If you could train at 16 bits per value instead of 32, and suffer a much smaller inaccuracy penalty than you would from IEEE32 to IEEE16...

For some reason I still haven't heard any predictions on when new fabs will come online to meet the current demand. This shouldn't be too hard to find out, since the building time of fabs is very predictable process.

The difficult question is more whether foreseeable memory demand will remain at the current level, grow even further, or shrink again.

> a path to a ~3x hardware cost reduction

Really?

How long do we have to wait until that ... cost reduction hits us?

Supply will not meet demand. What incentive do the handful of dram manufacturers have to end the party? This is what happens when legal monopolies finally win control. Dont't worry. The patents will expire in a few decades. Our grandkids will see DDR5 get cheap again. The system functions as intended.

2-3x is completely dwarfed by the remaining improvements in training which is still in its infancy relatively