Doesn't Apple routinely do the same thing? Reserve chip production for the leading-edge nodes, and sometimes enter into similar deals for other tech such as displays? I'm not seeing any evidence that this was intentional "warfare" on OpenAI's part: they're just making a high-stakes bet that they can ultimately find a better and higher-margin use for that raw DRAM than HNers' gaming battlestations, or whatever the next-best use was when they made that deal.
No, apple does not buy production capacity to prevent others from using it. They buy it to use it themselves.
The wafers are not DRAM. This is more likely burning oil wells so your enemy can't use them. Wafers are to chips what steel blanks are to engines. You basically need clean rooms just to accept delivery and entire fabs to do anything. Someone who doesn't own a fab buying the wafers is essentially buying them to destroy them.
