I'm not much of a conspirationist, but this memory "shortage" doesn't add up for me; it's like AI companies went from buying 10 memories as usual to 1000000, all of a sudden! It's too fast, and sus.

It’s a production issue mostly. And one that has been predicted for a while now. High Bandwidth Memory is what the AI companies want. Which while it isn’t the same as consumer DDR RAM, it does use the same chips. It’s the production of the chips that are the bottleneck. Combined with the recent and rapid growth in AI data centers. That’s where the price increase and shortages come from, corporate buyers have bought out production, before it hits the consumer market. Demand has risen sharply, and supply isn’t able to keep up (and it isn’t a simple thing to just make more chips).