>When there are only two or three supplies of any given technology, they can directly or indirectly work together to increase prices because: what are you going to do to stop them?

How many highly qualified people are there in the world that would allow for more than two or three suppliers of things like EUV lithography and modern operating systems/browsers and other advanced fields?

Endless? The reason there is a shortage of a given profession for most jobs isn't a lack of talented people, it's a lack of job opportunities due to the aforementioned lack of competition resulting in fewer people entering the field. When you only have two or three competitors in a given field, they need fewer people to do the same work.

Do you think when T-Mobile acquired Sprint, it created more jobs than the individual companies for experts in cellular networks, or fewer? Do you think it's just a coincidence that after that acquisition was completed, T-Mobile immediately started raising prices?

There are certainly bottlenecks created by insufficient competitors resulting in insufficient pay to incentivize people, but at a certain level of expertise, there is also a bottleneck created simply because all people are not equal in their capabilities.

The T-Mobile example is irrelevant to the specific problem of there being very advanced fields requiring a ton of hard work that not all people can do, much less overcoming numerous real life obstacles like logistics of obtaining the necessary education.

Just to show how hard the problem is, you have a top down, well oiled dictatorship country with 1.5B people with a lot of purchasing power unable to reproduce the chain of knowledge needed to create the top end microchips after decades.

Some things just take time, effort, and luck.

Your example reinforces the point that its lack of competition. If there were more competitors in the market, there would be more places to go with the tribal knowledge to build said products. Chinas problem is directly because of a lack of tribal knowledge as a result of intentional information withholding by other countries.