Lots of small companies won’t survive the components price hike and shortage
Making it illegal would be a regulation and you can’t have those unless they’re regulating sex or gender.
It’s legal because capitalists have captured the levers of power nearly everywhere.
Capitalism baby
Anything is legal if you have enough money.
They also used copyrighted material without the consent of the authors to train their models.
They polluted the air and stole clean water from communities who lived close to their data centers.
Hoarding RAM is only the tip of the iceberg.
Because in the us if you bribe the president anything is legal. Here, legal just means you bribed the president. If you didn’t bribe him it’s not legal.
ITT: answers explaining why they’re doing it rather than the actual question of how it’s legal.
I guess the short answer is, when you’re rich and powerful, who’s going to stop you? We don’t have a functioning government and haven’t since the 70s at the latest; it’s been captured and only serves wealth and Wall StreetStreet now.
They’re too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to care.
It’s just how free market works again free market, leading to capital concentration, basic and unavoidable capitalist contradiction.
Nothing free about us markets lol
Lack of regulations resulting in a rampant speculation like the above is by definition one of the core tenets of free market. That free market just don’t work for people like me or you.
No, there’s plenty of regulation, it’s corrupt regulation and that’s not free market.
People think “free” means “I can do whatever I want,” but really it usually means “people with more power than me can do whatever they want to me.”
Imagine this: You’re a dirty rotten billionaire. Look what you can do with your miniscule billions if you had just 10 of them.
With $10 billion, if you invested it to generate a conservative 5% annual return, you could spend roughly $1.37 million per day ($500 million a year) without ever touching the principal. If you didn’t invest it, you could spend over $100,000 daily for roughly 274 years.
These assholes just love hoarding the wealth and anything else they can so long as you peasants don’t get any of it. Instead, think of wealth this way in that it is like fertilizer, if you spread it around evenly everything grows nicely and beautiful. If you hoard that shit, it stinks something awful.
Fuck tech bros, fuck billionaires, fuck the elite; they’re destroying this world and the 99% of us’ way of life because of their greed.
I agree with your sentiment, but I’m compelled to point out that their “billions” is in the valuation of the preferred shares of the corporations they control. If they were to sell to get their billions in cash, the value of their portfolio that analysts purport they have would plummet to pennies on the dollar and very quickly.
Billionaires take out loans using their appraised assets as collateral when they need a couple tens of hundreds of millions in cash.
These billionaires literally writes checks their bodies can’t cash without tacit approval from the Fed and SEC.
They think of it like a game. Its just like some dickhead on reddit posting endless bullshit on reddit to amass internet points, except that billionaire points affect the well-being of the real world, which neither the reddit dickhead nor the billionaire really live in or care about.
Greed, I guess? The answer to most issues in capitalism. They want to make as much money as possible before the bubble bursts.
There is no law regulating who someone can sell something, assuming it’s not regulated goods aka drugs, guns.
AI companies just outbid everyone else by a big enough margin and there are less than a handful of companies producing RAM as it’s rather complicated and specific production process.
New producers cant easily enter the market due to the complexity and completely insane initial investment cost in setting up the production and they would have to design their own RAM chips as well, which would take years if not decades.
Current chip producers don’t want to increase production either due to liking high price and being afraid of the bubble popping.
Even if there is some legal grounds for government stepping in and regulating supply to avoid collapse of smaller companies who can’t outbid AI companies. They are dining and getting funded by the same AI companies.
They never bought the RAM, they put out a letter of intent to buy up to 40% of the global supply. Because business leaders are equal parts malicious and stupid, this lead to a run on RAM before prices spiked due to low supply, causing a price spike due to low supply.
A letter of intent is not a contact and is not binding. It’s the equivalent of a New Year’s Resolution blog post.
The fabs themselves work on multi-year contracts where the buyer commits to purchasing a certain capacity of the total production. If they expect to produce 100 million sticks in a year and someone offers to buy 40 million of them, it’s still in their interest to have many buyers in case that customer can’t follow through or backs out.
Money.
The answer to any “Why is company X fucking everyone?” is always because it makes some asshole somewhere an obscene amount of profit.
The reality is, it isn’t so much about legality, it’s about how one company has more money than you and therefore, can buy so much.
You mind as well re-write “how is it legal” to “IT’S NOT FAIR! WAH!”.
My brain re-writes it from “our society must have regulations to prevent this!” to “we should seize the means of production to make sure this shit can never happen again.”
Capitalism! Fuck yeah!
