Tom Mainelli

I think one thing that's really important to note is

The memory industry historically has been kind of a boom and bust industry.

The memory vendors, they build more capacity, they get into an oversupply situation, the industry ramps up to leverage more memory, and then eventually they get into supply constraint and then they start the whole process again.

With the AI boom, it's basically a whole new area that is requiring memory.

And so our best estimate is that this is going to continue to be a problem throughout 2026 and could easily slide into 2027.

The memory vendors are going to eventually build out their capacity.

But if you're a memory vendor, this is a very good time to be a memory vendor.

to sell your product for the most money that they can get.

And so, you know, the other thing that I think is important to note is, you know, there's a lot of talk about the AI build out.

There's a lot of talk about whether we are in an AI bubble.

And if it turns out we're in a bubble and some of these hyperscalers and other data center

companies pause, then this problem could go away relatively quickly.

But there's really no sign of that happening here in January.

It really is.

In fact, one of those companies, Micron, announced, I think, in December that they were going to exit the consumer RAM market.

They've got bigger customers in the data center, and they're not going to allocate that to consumer demand on a relatively low margin basis.

product.

And so there's certainly an opportunity for others to enter this space or for small companies to potentially increase the memory that they're building.

But memory is a really capital intensive industry.

And so it's not something where we would expect two or three big players to jump in and help alleviate this problem anytime soon.