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.
Also that's not what the bullwhip effect is - although I know what you are saying. The bullwhip scenario is about the effect of communication and batching through various layers in the supply chain, this is more similar to the cobweb effect/theory.
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.
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.
BTW all RAM is severely overpriced, not only the one using the latest process nodes.
Look up Qiminda, ProMOS, Elpida. They invested in capacity during booms.
Now it's 2021 and someone gets a tanker stuck in the Suez, sending the price of oil sky-high. How long does the ship have to be stuck before you spend those billions of dollars on a bet that it'll recoup before someone gets the ship out?
It's always easier to see the right move in hindsight!
Question is, without hindsight, 2022 rolls around, Ethereum moves to PoS, do you sell NVDA?
In a world where TSMC is functionally capable of the same level of production but not in such a complicated geopolitical situation regarding semiconductor manufacturing, things would be quite different.
It's the main reason outsourcing fabs is so much more economical. If NVIDIA built fabs just for itself, the fab's CAPEX would be amortized over fewer components than if a third party did, even if NVIDIA was the largest customer. It's also one of the main reasons Intel fell behind. So much of their cashflow was to build fabs that made an order of magnitude less chips than TSMC. Even worse, they had to write down the CAPEX for the fabs, which affected their financial statements.
Anyways, companies like apple and nvidia have very long term horizons and contracts, which probably have first right of refusal contracts on capacity, etc. In the short to medium term, apple probably isn't paying much more for most components. If this memory shortage lasts decades, they'll eventually end up paying more.
The price has doubled but it takes 10-15 years on average just for the permitting of a new mine in the US.
Offshore drilling for oil is a 7-8 year project.
People in software I think can't but help to have a Laissez-faire bias because software is so Laissez-faire. Most other businesses are highly regulated.