This one isn’t artificial scarcity, I’m afraid

There is literally less available for the consumer because all the various chip fabs have had their capacity bought for AI data centre expansion.

This is not the same as a scalper situation where the supply has been taken but ultimately needs to be sold back to consumers. You, a single consumer, are competing with the buying power of the likes of Google, Amazon & Microsoft.

Plus they have booked up this capacity pretty far in advance, so even if they stopped buying up more today (they will not until the AI bubble pops), consumer prices aren’t going to change until all of that capacity reservation has passed. Then after that, all the companies that wanted to buy capacity, but couldn’t compete with the big ones will get their turn. Then eventually the fabs might find themselves with a bit of surplus capacity to increase the production of consumer hardware. Then there will be the pent-up consumer demand keeping prices elevated for a good number of months or years (depending how long this all goes on for). After all that, supply and demand could see prices dropping back down a bit.

These fabs will start to physically expand on order to increase capacity if it goes on long enough, but these kind of expansions take many years to build and bring online.

Other things to remember, the current US administration is motivated to prop up this bubble as long as they can because it’s basically the only industry in the US that’s not shitting the bed currently, so when it pops a lot of US GDP is going with it and probably going to cause a pretty bad recession. Another is inflation; by the time this is all over prices might have inflated enough due to the devaluation of money that any drop in prices would be offset.

Basically, I wouldn’t hold your breath