Sub-10-day memory inventories, forecasts of the tightest supply in history for 2027 — and the stocks down 38% in three months. That divergence has a long pedigree.
Memory is the most violently cyclical major industry in technology. Since the 1980s it has swung from shortage to glut roughly every three to four years, and at every peak the same sentence gets written: this time demand is structural. PCs said it. Smartphones said it. Now AI says it.
Here's what's genuinely different, and it's not the demand story — it's that the market refuses to believe it. A 3 P/E at the start of a claimed supercycle means investors are pricing the next glut before the shortage even arrives. Forty years of busts taught them that.
The interesting question isn't whether the shortage comes. It's whether an industry can have a supercycle nobody is willing to pay for. #history #longread
Memory is the most violently cyclical major industry in technology. Since the 1980s it has swung from shortage to glut roughly every three to four years, and at every peak the same sentence gets written: this time demand is structural. PCs said it. Smartphones said it. Now AI says it.
Here's what's genuinely different, and it's not the demand story — it's that the market refuses to believe it. A 3 P/E at the start of a claimed supercycle means investors are pricing the next glut before the shortage even arrives. Forty years of busts taught them that.
The interesting question isn't whether the shortage comes. It's whether an industry can have a supercycle nobody is willing to pay for. #history #longread
