TurboQuant Only Saves 35% Memory—Wall Street Still Obsessed With “6x” Headlines

Spot prices for memory chips have plunged sharply in recent weeks, sending shares of companies like Micron Technology tumbling.

Analyst Dan Nystedt views this as a classic peak-cycle signal, pointing to smartphone makers pushing back against elevated DDR4 prices.

However, analyst Jukan disagrees, arguing that the price resistance is limited to legacy memory. Demand for newer technologies like DDR5 and HBM remains strong, suggesting memory companies are no longer purely cyclical plays.

Meanwhile, HSBC believes market fears are overblown, stating that the AI-driven memory supercycle is only at its midpoint, with potential supply shortages lasting another 1–2 years.

After the shock triggered by DeepSeek, NVIDIA saw a sharp crash — only to rebound even stronger, highlighting just how resilient AI-driven demand remains. 

🚨 Buying $Micron Technology(MU)$   tonight. Wall Street has officially lost its mind.

Micron has plunged 16% in just a week—one reason? Investors are scared that Google’s new TurboQuant tech will tank AI memory demand.

The headlines scream: AI inference memory demand will drop 6x.

But after digging into TurboQuant this weekend, here’s the truth: it really only reduces AI inference memory demand by ~35%.

Why? The “6x” is compared to unquantized numbers, but the industry already uses 8-bit KV Cache quantization. Real improvement is only 3x.

And since KV Cache is roughly 50% of total AI memory, the overall savings end up around 35%.

Sure, 35% memory savings is huge—it lets AI companies serve more users and longer contexts. But no AI company is buying fewer GPUs because of this. Not even close.

The past three years have shown: AI demand grows, efficiency gains are reinvested to scale, not shrink.

Since ChatGPT launched, compute efficiency has improved hundreds of times. Yet demand for hardware? Still exploding—AI usage has grown hundreds of thousands of times.

Yet Wall Street is still evaluating Micron like a normal cyclical chip stock, scared AI capex won’t pay off. That’s just wrong. AI is a completely different beast.

@TigerPM  @TigerStars  @TigerObserver  @Daily_Discussion  @Tiger_comments