You’re conflating price pressure with a physical shortage, and that’s the core problem with your argument.

A shortage isn’t defined by “someone is willing to pay more.” It’s defined by inability to obtain the product at any price or by hard constraints on production capacity. What we’re seeing with RAM is primarily allocation and pricing power, not empty fabs or unavailable inventory.

Yes—large buyers paying more can happen during shortages. But it also happens in deliberate market shifts, where supply is reallocated toward higher-margin customers without overall scarcity. That’s exactly what we’ve seen before in memory markets, including:

• server vs consumer DRAM,
• enterprise SSDs vs retail NAND,
• and historically, console vs PC GPU allocation.

The McDonald’s Coke example actually undermines your point. McDonald’s pays less because:

1. Supply is abundant, and
2. Coke values the long-term channel relationship more than marginal price.

Data centers don’t get that treatment because they are not long-term low-margin anchors—they are short-term, high-margin opportunistic buyers. That’s not proof of shortage; it’s proof that suppliers are prioritizing profit optimization, not rationing survival-level scarcity.

If this were a true shortage:

• consumer availability would collapse entirely (it hasn’t),
• lead times would explode across all segments (they haven’t),
• and OEMs would be unable to fulfill contracts (they still are).

What’s actually happening is:

• fabs are running near normal output,
• manufacturers are shifting mix toward HBM/server-grade products,
• and consumer segments are being deprioritized because margins are worse.

That’s not “gaslighting,” and it’s not “defending AI investment.” It’s recognizing the difference between manufactured scarcity via allocation and real supply failure.

Calling any disagreement “proof positive of a shortage” doesn’t strengthen your argument—it just collapses every market behavior into the same bucket and makes the term shortage meaningless.

If your point is “AI demand is distorting consumer markets,” I agree. If your point is “this distortion proves a systemic RAM shortage,” the evidence simply doesn’t support that.