This whole saga has been a ridiculous waste of everybody's time and energy. There's no compelling argument that points to these new innovations not otherwise happening if RAM prices weren't artificially inflated by the fever dream of private equity.
The demand for high-ram consumption applications is higher than ever and rising. That demand is not created by nvidia, but nvidia's customers. nvidia's customers are buying nvidia parts built with other's ram because they have customers renting the compute.
Whoever nvidia is buying ram from will simply sell to the next highest bidder, and the ram will still be sold out through the coming years.
RAM prices are a result of skyrocketing demand. That's hardly a fever dream.
You can hardly blame RAM suppliers for taking the money of people who are coming to them begging to pay more than the person before them in line. It's not like they are squeezing the market in some cartel price-fixing racket.It's the customers who are willing trying to pay more for better access. The innovations and the price of RAM are so non-sequitur at this point; I can't understand what point you're making. Sure, if RAM were as easy to get as the circuit boards they're being put on, innovation would be the same (or accelerated!) but that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that RAM is incredibly supply constrained and ramping production to meet the demand of a seemingly insatiable market takes a long time for a product this complicated and specialized.
If any of the manufacturing companies could have seen this coming, they'd have started ramping production to insane levels 5 years ago, and they'd be taking in just as much money as Nvidia is.