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just supply and demand commies.

Yup. Three companies can collude on prices, or they could raise prices without colluding, knowing that they will sell all they can make. It isn't like Saudi Arabia or De Beers diamonds, where output is easily scaled up.

If these three companies put their memory up for auction on ebay, the prices would wind up being about the same. If one of the companies sold at the old price, a shell company would buy it ALL, and resell at about the same markup.

If there were a bubble pop, and demand went down, no one would cry for these companies losing their shirts.

Now, one does not put up a fab plant over night, and the old fabs cannot make the memory that people want to spend a lot of money on. So, anyone thinking of getting into the business or even expanding capacity, will need those high prices to fund the expansion.

We had a less extreme version of these price hikes in the early '90s, when people were swapping out their 4x256K Mac SIMMs for 1 MBx 4, and PCs were finding ways to use more than 1MB of RAM. New tech came on board, and things returned to normal.