They aren’t?

They are buying up capacity from manufacturers who are stopping production of DRAM and pivot to HBM which is more profitable. Abandoning DRAM which affects a lot more than just “consumer grade RAM”

They’re publicly traded companies. Their investor meetings point out that HBM is not more profitable.

It is in theory more guaranteed profit because it’s a smaller number of bigger contracts. But that’s the gamble they’re making.

But isn’t it kind of a game of chicken then for the consumer markets? Whoever gambles the other way, can win in both volume and availability, being able to cut the others off market just by pricing, enabled by the prior two points, get brand points by the ladle while at it, and kind of become a staple of the consumer market. When the bubble pops and others return, the market isn’t the same and everyone else sits at a disadvantage?

Yes.

Which is why it’s bad that the only 3 companies with capacity currently are colluding.

So that you can’t.

You can’t organize against billionaires online if walled garden censored posting to the cloud is the only thing available to anyone. You can’t pirate media if you can’t store media locally. You can’t run a ad blocker if they’re not allowed on their app store. You can’t install linux if your tablet can’t be jailbroken.

You have too much freedom. They must have control back. We allowed them to have enough money to take it, they just had to fool the rubes with the promise of utopian robotic labor via addiction.

This is it. Add in that AI is a 1-way filter of information, substituting web search engines. The AI companies will get all the questions and queries from people instead of search engines, you will not find information unless through the black box service of an AI company. The death of the open web, for the billionaires benefit.

They’re buying production time from RAM manufacturers, which means there’s no time left to make consumer grade ram