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Patents is not the issue here. Not even close.

The up-front investment of a memory fab is measured in billions, and takes years to construct and get running. The margin on the chips themselves is terrible, so without scale its not worth even trying. DDR5 is a industry standard that takes some effort to conform to, but the licence fees is a drop in the bucket to the cost of creating a fab.

The fabricators were cautious about increasing production, and slow to start planning. It takes further time to build up capacity, and if the demand drops down, they may end up producing dram at a loss when the market flips over to oversupply. The demand whiplash could kill any company that dared betting on increasing production. See the "bullwhip effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect which has killed semiconductor fabricators before.

There is a discussion to be had about how to maintain national semiconductor production in Europe and US as a strategic industry, but historic attempts have all failed.

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I have fairly simplistic view of the economics involved here. Could you explain why the ability to sell more chips wouldn't be sufficient enough incentive to increase supply?
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Let's imagine you're drilling oil instead. You have to spend billions of dollars over years finding and developing a new oilfield to make any profit back. And once you have it, you have to continuously spend enormous amounts of money to keep producing it, which means you have an effective price floor you can't go below.

Now it's 2021 and someone gets a tanker stuck in the Suez, sending the price of oil sky-high. Do you spend those billions of dollars on a bet that it'll recoup before someone gets the ship unstuck?

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Not the person you’re replying to, but RAM has historically been a boom-or-bust business, and companies that invest to meet demand during a boom cycle usually have that new capacity come online just in time for the bust.

If it was just variable costs and new capacity was available today they’d do it. But there are substantial fixed costs and delays to increasing capacity, and that uncertainty makes it risky.

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That's such a nonsensical argument, it holds for every other business too and in this case it's just a lame excuse for monopolization. If you are that chicken and can't stomach competition you should not be in business anyway.

The current RAM manufactures were convicted of conspiracy to manipulate prices back in the 2000s or thereabout, doing so is their modus operandi, but this time the government is participating in the racket.

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Bringing on new fabs takes many years and billions of dollars. You're exposing yourself to a lot of risk if you build now and find that the gold rush is over by the time your new capacity is online.
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