Isn't scalping a term used for tickets? Also, these companies supposedly intend to actually use the RAM they ordered, not reselling at some inflated price.

It's all fair game IMHO, except the elephant in the room which is that the AI company bubble might pop.

Buying and selling at market price is rarely illegal. I think in the USSR it might be?

That's tech... Moore Law was steadily going until raw CPU got stuck for a few years, switching from single core to multicore then heterogeneous cpus, all those requiring to rewrite software in a scalable manner and then consider newer schedulers switching between performance/efficiency cores and changing CPU freqs.

Also, you have Meta and Google investing in simplified performant versions of their stack for developing countries which is similar.

What's funny though, I see people that sometimes says it's cheaper to build the app they need in a single prompt than to search for it.

Bad times for the two-space copying garbage collectors.

At this size, I think we have to start worrying about a 2008-type default risk. AI companies will have ordered all the RAM and paid some kind of deposit for that, but actually taking delivery and paying for it is still in the future and the sums of capital involved are extremely large.