Is this in practice what's going to happen, or are (1) the prices going to hike (and never go down) for the consumer and (2) the memory companies will just continue doing what they already do because they're still selling their old shovels to the gold diggers?

I don't see how this will benefit the consumer, but I might be missing some second order effect?

I read somewhere that the memory companies were massivly pushed for lowest prices especially by companies like apple.

I want to hope that this money will lead to more capacity, more R&D and lower prices in the long term again.

Nvidia would have changed its GPU strategy a long time ago if the demand wouldn't be real. They still can afford the GPU prices. But memory is not a monopoly.

For memory though i do assume a lot more people and companies want a massive amount more memory than ever before. I have 64gb in my pc for a few years now, i was quite happy with that. It became a no brainer. But today? Hey give me 100, 300 and even more. I really want to run bigger LLM models locally.