Right now, because everyone is fearful of shortages, they've overbought or are in the process of overbuying.
At some point, everyone is going to realize that, in the US, carrying inventory has tax implications, and everybody is going to try to dump a bunch of inventory back into the system that they really didn't need and aren't prepared to pay taxes on.
Which will be fine for a while--until the middlemen get back up to what they consider useful inventory levels and quit buying. And all the prices will crash.
This is because a newly competitive AMD takes up a ton of wafers. They can't make them fast enough, and in 2022 they are releasing a completely new platform with DDR 5 on 5nm, and presumably new GPU line.
This should again clobber Intel 10nm products. Even if there's no chip shortage, the customers of TSMC are very healthy (AMD, Apple, other phone manufacturers).
End companies, themselves. Any inventory that shows up gets overbought immediately. Two companies I know have x10 the microcontrollers they need for the year because they overbought when they could.
If they pushed those microcontrollers back right now, they'd make quite a nice profit. But they won't.
Instead, those companies will hit the tax implications starting in December and then will try to push their overbought inventory. Of course, at that point everybody will be trying to push their inventory and the prices will crash.
Likely December.
Right now, because everyone is fearful of shortages, they've overbought or are in the process of overbuying.
At some point, everyone is going to realize that, in the US, carrying inventory has tax implications, and everybody is going to try to dump a bunch of inventory back into the system that they really didn't need and aren't prepared to pay taxes on.
Which will be fine for a while--until the middlemen get back up to what they consider useful inventory levels and quit buying. And all the prices will crash.