If they don't expand capacity much, the only negative consequences I foresee happening for them is that they might lose spending discipline, and that systems will be set up to make do with a little less memory. Apart from that, it's just very high profits followed by more or less regular profits.

They could wind up losing all their business to China though.

China has memory makers who are creeping up through the stages of production maturity, and once they hit then there's no going back.

If the existing makers can't meet supply such that Chinese exports get their foot in the door, they may find they never get ahead again due to volume - that domestic market is huge so they have scale, and the gaming market isn't going to care because they get anything at the moment, which is all you'll need for enterprise to say "are we really afraid of memory in this business?"

Good point, it's a risk but so far the Chinese competition isn't up to par and it's unclear whether they'll be able to exploit the current window of opportunity.

You think this window is short? We've been dealing with this for years and years, and to me it seems more like incumbent manufacturers are too comfortable milking cash cows.

This window of opportunity (very high RAM prices) opened about half a year ago.

That's only for normal RAM. I'm talking about broader aspect: HBM shortage and high prices have been around for longer, and Chinese manufacturers are also climbing up and expanding there.

> If the existing makers can't meet supply such that Chinese exports get their foot in the door, they may find they never get ahead again due to volume

The answer to that is government regulation. Ban anything Chinese or slap it with tariffs. That is what tariffs are intended for - not for the BS the current administration has done.

Good luck actually pulling that off, it'll just kneecap US/Western industry, just as the current tariff and war madness has helped drag the US economy into the gutter.

Surely this can be solved with financial engineering. The memory makers build more capacity, but they finance it with something like floating-rate notes linked to an index of memory prices, or even catastrophe bonds or AT1s. Or more crudely, set up special purpose vehicles to build the extra capacity, and issue convertible bonds from those; if the memory market collapses, investors don't get paid, but they do get a memory factory.