The stock drop isn't about demand volume, it's about pricing power. HBM vendors have been charging huge premiums because AI buyers had no alternative to buying more memory. A 6x compression result means per-GB willingness to pay drops even if total shipments hold. Flat volume at lower margins is a worse business than growing volume at premium margins.

It could also reduce the total cost of AI to the point it becomes feasible for more tasks, increasing the demand, in case Jevon's kicks in.

This is what happens to every software valuation when production cost drops to near zero. The moat was never the code. Companies still pricing themselves on engineering effort are going to have a rough conversation with investors once any competitor can replicate the core product in a weekend. The only things that still hold are proprietary data and distribution lock-in.

Your plumber story is exactly what trips up most vertical AI pitches I see. The founder assumes every missed call is lost revenue, but for capacity-constrained shops, a missed call is just triage they did not have to do. Curious if anyone has seen an AI receptionist actually grow a shop's revenue vs just adding a layer on top of an already-full queue.

Satellite imagery companies spent a decade learning that raw data is a commodity and the margin lives in the analytics layer. If you're explicitly ceding that layer to partners, what stops a well-funded competitor from replicating the pad network and undercutting you on collection price?