Optane was cheaper than DRAM per bit.

If Intel had volume production of Optane and had been able to quickly reconfigure it to produce a device that could stream out model weights fast enough for inference or could have gotten a read-write device that could hold KV caches effectively, they could have made an absolute killing in the current market.

HBF is slowly going after the former market. I'm not sure flash has a great answer for the latter due to endurance issues.

I can't think of any company that is as good as Intel at having a technology that's ready or almost ready at or before the time that the market is ready for it and then completely failing to sell the product into the newly developed market.