It's not sustainable because it'll basically ruin all of the industries connected to memory. OpenAI, Anthropic etc. all need a massive amount of compute to train and serve models, and increases in memory price will all drive up their already massive costs. And then on the other end, the people they need to use their AI services cannot either afford the devices they need to access the devices, or the device costs go up so much that they cannot afford to buy the services. If for example budget phones disappear completely because of memory prices, those consumers disappear from the customer pool and then the budget phone manufacturers disappear and stop buying memory, AI companies spend even more to build models for fewer people, etc.

Will there be a budget phone market with these prices? What about budget laptops? Can there exist a gaming console market when memory costs are so high? And what happens to the companies that sell goods and services to the users of those devices?

And obviously, if people see that you're extracting an exorbitant amount of profit, you're gonna have a lot more people eyeing your industry as ripe for competition, since some company would probably not mind eating some of your pie. I'd say that the current memory cartel has a very real risk from China right now. And if you get competition during the boom period, you're also gonna be competing with them during the bust period too.