I think tying this to resilient AI spending is misleading. The current AI spending boom has jolted a lot of fabs and companies into realizing that they’re not adequately prepared for the next few decades of semiconductor markets regardless of how AI turns out. That the previous market of divided consumer and business segments is ill-suited to a future where compute is more universal between the two, and that if they want to avoid one going bust when the other booms (like the current memory apocalypse) then they need to be ready to meet that sort of demand. Then you mix in nationalist tensions and China quickly rising to fill the consumer gap with older (but still excellent) specced hardware like DDR4, and the writing is on the wall for the traditionally Western-dominated compute industry: adapt to changing demands or die, just like manufacturing did.

What I’m watching is the timeline. If China can get DDR4 kit out in volume (or even better, DDR5) faster than the AI bubble deflates or markets correct, then the future consumer compute players will be Chinese, not American, especially if they can ship kit at pre-COVID pricepoints.