| IMPORTANT CONTEXT TO MY ANSWER: There is no such thing as a free market There are 3 suppliers in the world that together have ~90% of global DRAM manufacturing capacity. I did not say they definitively were a cartel, but the effect is the same: raising prices together, lack of competition (via market consolidation etc) means there is no viable way to make more capacity in any kind of reasonable time frame, and they all moved most capacity away from consumer products imo to shore up giant deals at locked-in high prices with large buyers. Now, I find it odd that to this day, there are still only 3 suppliers and ram prices (and SSD prices) have not really followed a reasonable pricing curve save for a few maybe a year pre-thecurrentnonsense, where it was getting closer to what I would have expected [I have not plotted the data for this, I just buy a lot of end-user priced ram and ssds for consumer and businesses, and have noticed the trend of prices staying unusually high compared to other tech] The current problem is mostly one of there being almost no way to make a new ssd/dram mfg for a bunch of reasons: top of the list is probably IP, then the cost+time. Being in this kind of position on a global scale is probably just immensely satisfying for stakeholders, but my feeling is it is now a global security and financial issue. My take is: use the force of the state to get them to expand capacity and cap pricing (yes, states of sufficient size can enforce this). If they say "we will take our ball and go home" then invalidate their patents and get to work on domestic backups. Capitalism will find any way to make more money. It doesnt matter if it harms all the entities that buy their products in the long run - short term gain and "someone will figure it out" will always win the day. Regan will haunt us till our doom if we dont start enforcing even antitrust. |
The core problem is, there is only one company making top-of-the-line lithography processes. Even if you are a government - ASML (and their suppliers) are fully booked out.
And even if you had dozens of billions of euros to sink into such a venture, you'll probably go online right into a bust phase of the pork cycle that drove the consolidations of the last decades.