Fuck AI

Look, I think you're right to be cautious about the fire sale idea, but ET is not a good example to go to here. You're talking about a very specific product; a single video game for a single system. There was no way to repurpose or reuse those cartridges (the data was permanently burned onto the ROM chips in them), and basically no one wanted to buy them at any price. You might as well compare to New Coke or Zima. It's not really analogous at all.

However, I do agree with the general thrust of your argument. RAM isn't expensive because they're selling consumer DIMMs to data centres. It's expensive because they're using the chips that would go into consumer DIMMs to make server RAM. So, best case scenario, server RAM prices crash while consumer prices stay sky high for a while. Same with GPUs; the cards Nvidia are building with those chips are in no way suitable for gaming. And those hard drives are probably being built with SAS connectors, not SATA.

So, IMO, there potentially could be a fire sale, especially as a lot of data centres go bankrupt and their assets get seized and sold off by the banks and bankruptcy courts (the former because these companies are using their compute hardware as collateral on their loans), but it'll only affect server hardware, not consumer hardware. We all still get fucked.