Yep, most of the "purchases" made by AI companies were done to screw over the other AI companies.
When the bubble bursts, the contracts will evaporate and the big memory manufacturers will slow down their output. The existing stock of memory will be sold to the likes of Corsair and Kingston who will then harvest the memory chips for consumer products.
I am a bit more optimistic. I think once one of these companies goes IPO it will flop and the money will leave (see SpaceX IPO's plummeting and DeepSeek eating their lunch). Nvidia will pivot to pushing local AI and remain healthy (and probably buy back a lot of their stock on the cheap)
AI generates output based on whatever was loaded into its model. Just as AI images all look the same, so to will be the stories they produce (until AI starts consuming AI generated stories, then it will become bat shit insane).
AI generates stories will be no better than the bargain bin knock off crap that existed before. AI can't innovate, it can only slap stuff together based on probability.
It isn't that easy, there are a lot of APIs and expected behavior that would break. They would need to make their own WINE.
Plus they would loose a lot of control over the eco-system that they have now. In the grand scheme of things Windows doesn't cost them a lot of money and it gives them the ability to push standards.
Innovation happens from failure. I like that Intel was trying new things. Even failures bear fruit (Sandybridge benefited from a lot of things introduced by Netburst).
Just like how AMD learned from the disaster that was Sledgehammer.
No it couldn't have. The design was discovered (to be fair, thanks to Itanium's failure) to be fundamentally broken. The compiler can't know what will be hitting the CPU when the program is actually run.
Even without Itanium they would have died. Intel and AMD caught up to the performance and were far cheaper with a larger user base.
With the exception of ARM the RISC cpus were on the retreat from workstation to server to specialty case.