alt Hacker NewsJatin Malek on Twitter had perhaps the best explanation of the DRAM crunch:
"The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible."
That's just a snarky way to describe all business investment that requires purchasing things made in the future. It's entirely normal.
You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be?
Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we are actually underestimating demand, and there is going to be tons of profit. Nobody knows for sure, but profit is very, very, very possible.