If only they were good conspiracies with some weight to them, but no, they fall apart if you have a rudimentary understanding of the subject.
They had built way too much capacity during the 90s and were losing money on every chip because they couldn’t run the fabs at full capacity. That’s why they colluded to increase the price to save their collective hides.
A new competitor wouldn’t be able to enter the market and lower the prices without also losing money. That’s not the case today, the Chinese are trying hard to do just that.
Conspiracies have been documented enough times that it is totally valid to surmise that there's one in place at any given time, about any given field.
A quick inquiry to google on 'proven conspiracy theories' returned ten results just on google's AI. And it left out Iran-contra -presumably for the sake of brevity.
Sorry, to think there's a conspiracy isn't so whacky and unhinged as people want to make it out to be.
From what I have seen, it cannot. It has become foundational the same way Internet 1.0 (eg. Email, Static HTML, Web Directories, SSL) became foundational for a significant portion of the global economy in the 1990s and 2000s.
It's a bit like the Sun/etc workstation market vs PCs, and high end expensive PCs vs cheap ones. Once the cheap PCs became "good enough" then they naturally dominated.
And these are supposedly the most brilliant corporations around, so other companies are seeing even less gain.
I stick with my theory that LLMs are GPU-like, not CPU-like. They will rarely solve a problem like an adept, but they can solve 1 000 000 million low-hanging fruit problems within a second in a way that there was just not enough eyeballs for before. They can also brute force problems.