Claude Sonnet 5 launched at less than half the flagship's price with ninety percent of its benchmark performance. The na...

Claude Sonnet 5 launched at less than half the flagship's price with ninety percent of its benchmark performance. The natural conclusion: AI is getting cheaper, so chip demand should ease. Every data point says otherwise.Inference costs fell 280-fold between 2022 and 2024 (Stanford AI Index). Enterprise AI spending tripled to $37B in 2025 anyway. DRAM contracts rose a record 90-95% in Q1 2026, NAND is projected up 70-75% in Q2, and SK Hynix has sold out its entire 2026 output. William Stanley Jevons described the mechanism in 1865: make a resource cheaper to use, and total consumption rises.The article walks through what this means chip by chip — DRAM, NAND, GPUs, and why CPUs are the calm exception — plus the strongest counterarguments (ASICs, MoE, small models) and why they fall short. One practical takeaway: retired server memory is appreciating for the first time in years.#AI #Semiconductors #DRAM #MemoryShortage #DataCenters #HBM #GPU #SSD #ITAD #ITAssetManagement #JevonsParadox #...