alt Hacker News> If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market work
The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
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> But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
Oh yea, governments can fix by putting 100 billion in memory fabs right now, and when demand crater in decade or so, let tax payer eat the cost of those fabs. At least it will benefit poor computer users like me.
Free Market doesn’t mean new ram production can “just be stood up”
And given that these are independent actors in the free market, they’ve seen the history of boom/bust cycles in this market
Free market doesn’t mean “everything just magically happens”
As has already been pointed out further down, OPEC is the perfect example of this. Things don't really work that way when the time scales are so extended. What we need is fracking, but silicon.
This system is too complex, the few individual players too big, with too many artificial distortions for the adjustment to equalize out in a way that's anything but years-long (it may have shock-waves that extend past the decade), and highly destructive to everyone who isn't OPEC, or their largest customers, in this analogy.
The brunt of it will be paid by the people further down the food chain.
> In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
That’s a good one!
> In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
Why would they?
And you claim to have historic examples where they did?
Even if the memory market was completely competitive the time it takes to expand supply is measured in years. There was no way for them to serve the AI demand without reducing supply given to everyone else in the short run
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Memory fab build out times are years not months. The existing ones already run 24/7. If these companies could pull more supply out of thin air they would, but they cannot.