FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.
There are never shortages in a free market, just higher prices.
same here, even when we went to larger hardware producers, they were basically we would sell you, but we cant actually get any RAM at all either.