This is wrong. The truth is far worse.
Sam Altman / OpenAI recognized that they were losing their LLM market lead to rapid advances by Google Gemini and others, so they took the most anti-competitive step they could.
They determined that the key inputs for AI advances and market leadership now were access to high speed storage and graphics processing - whether directly or via contract to datacenters as-yet unbuilt.
They already had significant contracts and share-trade arrangements with Nvidia - whom is happily gouging the AI Bros for all they can. What everyone in that market needs though, is high speed memory chips for SSDs, RAM, and graphics card memory. So, they secretly negotiated two contracts simultaneously with the two largest memory chip manufacturers to aquire ~40% of the memory market supply.
They have agreed to buy memory chips wholesale, unuseable until they go through further manufacturing to install them intp RAM/SSDs/GFX - but OpenAI has zero facilities or contracts to perform those steps, and as yet has made no public announcement (that I've seen) of their actual plans for what to do with the chips they've entered contracts to buy.
It is a strategy called 'market denial', and we are all paying for it with much higher prices for anything that needs these chips or is tangential to those markets.
