I now consider this a mafia that aims to milk us for more money. This includes all AI companies but also manufacturers who happily benefit from this. It is a de-facto monopoly. Governments need to stop allowing this milking scheme to happen.
"Monopoly" means one seller, so you can't say multiple X makes a monopoly and make sense. You probably mean collusion.
If demand exceeds supply, either prices rise or supply falls, causing shortages. Directly controlling sellers (prices) or buyers (rationing) results in black markets unless enforcement has enough strength and integrity. The required strength and integrity seems to scale exponentially with the value of the good, so it's typically effectively impossible to prevent out-of-spec behavior for anything not cheap.
If everyone wants chips, semiconductor manufacturing supply should be increased. Governments should subsidize domestic semiconductor industries and the conditions for them to thrive (education, etc.) to meet both goals of domestic and economic security, and do it in a way that works.
The alternative is decreasing demand. Governments could hold bounty and incentive programs for building electronics that last a long time or are repairable or recyclable, but it's entirely possible the market will eventually do that.
Why would government officials and politicians want to stop making money?
Technically it's a lot closer to monopsony (Sam Altman/OAI cornering 40% of the market on DRAM in a clever way for his interests that harms the rest of the world that would want to use it). I keep hoping that somehow necessity will spur China to become the mother of invention here and supply product to serve the now lopsided constrained supply given increasing demand but I just don't know how practical it will be.
I mean, if you were the Micron CEO, would you bet the company on demand sustaining from AI? It seems like it could all go belly up very fast.
There is no monopoly in AI. I can name at least 10 big actors worldwide.
When it's more than one company working together in a monopoly-like fashion, the term is "oligopoly".
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oligopoly