A line is going around the market: this round of memory-chip price hikes is an AI-driven structural transformation, and storage has finally "left the cycle behind and joined the AI core track." DRAM has risen three quarters running; houses keep marking third-quarter contract prices higher, past thirty percent, and expect the squeeze to run to 2028 at least; the leaders guide mid-year profit up tens, even hundreds of times over. All these numbers read as one conclusion: this time is different, this is not a cycle, this is growth.

But whenever an industry solemnly announces it has "left the cycle behind," history has waited quietly for it at the very next turn. Memory is not the first industry to say this, and almost certainly not the last. What deserves asking is never whether the boom can last to 2028, but a plainer, more awkward question: what disease is this fierce round of price hikes curing — and at the very same time, what is it planting?