It feels like abuse. They shouldn't be able to get away with such trickery.

With a functional government, antitrust enforcement would prevent a single company from driving economy-wide price inflation out of an attempt to starve its competition. Since we don't have a functional government, we'll ungracefully take this up the ass.

stockpiling solely in order to deprive your competitors of a commodity is anti-competitive and illegal

You do know that they can hire semiconductor packaging companies to put together memory modules the same way they bought the DRAM wafers, right?

Sure thing. Are they? And also, why would they do that? Do you think OpenAI wants to enter into the DRAM manufacturing business? Or were they looking for a way to take as much supply away as possible - paying for the wafers instead of finished DRAM?

My word, how lacking in imagination. Are you forgetting that there's something that OpenAI does that requires lots of RAM and that OpenAI are very much in bed with not one but two GPU makers (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45521629) they could send the wafers to to build hardware for them?