I now consider this a mafia that aims to milk us for more money. This includes all AI companies but also manufacturers who happily benefit from this. It is a de-facto monopoly. Governments need to stop allowing this milking scheme to happen.
e.g., the Phoebus cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
If demand exceeds supply, either prices rise or supply falls, causing shortages. Directly controlling sellers (prices) or buyers (rationing) results in black markets unless enforcement has enough strength and integrity. The required strength and integrity seems to scale exponentially with the value of the good, so it's typically effectively impossible to prevent out-of-spec behavior for anything not cheap.
If everyone wants chips, semiconductor manufacturing supply should be increased. Governments should subsidize domestic semiconductor industries and the conditions for them to thrive (education, etc.) to meet both goals of domestic and economic security, and do it in a way that works.
The alternative is decreasing demand. Governments could hold bounty and incentive programs for building electronics that last a long time or are repairable or recyclable, but it's entirely possible the market will eventually do that.
If there is already demand at this inflated price, shouldn’t we ask why more capacity is not coming online naturally first?
...and why it has been consistently the case for a long while.
The non financial parts, which include mandated restructuring and penalties to directors including incarceration however, are not tokenistic. They'd be appealed and delayed, but at some point the shareholders would seek redress from the board. Ignoring judicial mandated instructions isn't really a good idea, current WH behaviour aside. If the defence here is "courts don't matter any more" that's very unhelpful, if true. At some point, a country which cannot enforce judicial outcomes has stopped being civil society.
My personal hope the EU tears holes in the FAANG aside, the collusive pricing of chips has been a problem for some time. The cost/price disjunction here is strong.