The first time Samsung and micron colluded on dram pricing was in the early 2000s when money was also falling from the sky due to high demand.

The fines they were charged with were a fraction of the profits they gained from price fixing.

It’s almost like having a limited number of manufacturers and a huge demand spike is actually an incentive for price fixing because they can work together to increase profits artificially.

I don’t think you really understand how price fixing and near monopoly markets work. With monopolies and near monopolies, there’s no real downside to colluding on prices, especially in the US where fines are basically guaranteed to be less than profits, and when your company is not headquartered in the US and can’t be forcibly broken apart by the government. If you’re the only company, or one of 3, then you can set whatever price you want. As long as the conspirators agree to pricing, no one will bat an eye at claims of high demand or supply chain issues because all your conspirators also have similarly high pricing.

Usually I say economists are insane cultists. But I really think you could benefit from reading some material on macroeconomics.

You mean the companies that have been tried and convicted in the past of forming a cartel to manipulate DRAM prices, and are now all raising prices through the roof and showing record profits, are not colluding again?

Just because the demand is coming from a different market doesn’t mean the manufacturers aren’t colluding to raise prices and gouge their customers.

The limiting factor for space data centers is absolutely not the cost to build them. The AI industry has already proven that they will burn the GDP of a small country just to have an LLM that shits out slightly better text that has coin flip level odds of being true.

The limiting factor here is one of thermodynamics. A travel mug for coffee works because it has a near vacuum between the inner lining and the outer shell. Vacuums are fantastic insulation because there’s no atoms there to transfer heat away. Very useful if you want hot coffee for a few hours. Space is a big vacuum, and data centers are giant heat generators. You’re basically putting a computer in a perfect insulation medium. It’s really stupid.