At the moment AI is to me like the debunked assumption of the existence of the Moai on Easter Island.

We cut down our trees to build more AI datacenter sculptures to please the AI gods.

Or the nuclear craze of 50s where radioactuve material where stuffed in everything like toothpaste, cream etc.

It's just a brand. They can start it up again later if enterprise demand falls.

I hear the cries of a thousand people in marketing right now. Building a brand takes time. I could see this if they were thinking they needed to re-invent the brand and to help with that they were strategically taking a break but that seems like a stretch.

It's kind of the opposite. Crucial is a throwaway brand so that the premium brand (Micron) can sell cheaper shit without tarnishing their enterprise branding.

my expectation is that they would either sell crucial RAM at such a low volume and/or such a high price that it would do more damage to the brand than sunsetting it and returning to it when the slowdown occurs.

AI being a useful component in our futures (depending on how much as a society we'll shun slop) and the current scale of AI investment being a line-go-up bubble are complementary, not exclusive.

It really is just dotcom all over again.

There's a huge difference between "AI" and "tech bros and finance guys getting amazed by an LLM that talks back to them without realising it's just a language model and not intelligence, so they started chucking the massive piles of cash they had lying around the world to evade taxes to them in a pyramid scheme of colossal scale". We currently are heading more and more towards the latter, and when it crashes it will sow so much distrust and curse the "AI" name so much that we'll probably get a decades-long AI winter after that. In the end none of this nonsense will help the world towards getting better AI any time soon.

Already most "AI researchers" outside of the big corps have basically turned in the last 3 years from "people training their models and doing research" to "webdev plugging into other people's APIs to use LLMs they don't know crap about". When, not if, the big AI bubble bursts, the damage done to the sector will be immense