> 1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?

For a RAM manufacturer, the incentive is to ramp up production AND prices. I doubt any of the names in the business is doing any work at all to lower their unit prices.

The current pricing isn't sustainable, and if you try to wring out the maximum amount of profit, you're gonna have competition spring up. The Chinese are probably salivating at this opportunity. Previously they would've had to sell memory at discount rates to get anyone to switch over to them, but now they'd have customers lined up for years if they were selling at the prices Samsung/Micron/SK Hynix were selling a year ago.

Meet the new memory cartel, it's just like the old memory cartel but with CXMT being priced a tiny tad below.

Safe to say they're not in it out of sheer altruism.