Apple certainty has the financial resources to support other companies in e.g. developing specific innovations or building infrastructure (and has done so in the past) as long as there's an RoI for Apple.

It would surely be a smart move to support the right partner in quickly starting a new memory factory, precisely to Apple's specifications, in return for a long-term supply agreement? If Apple could secure their memory supply and at a lower cost than all of the their PC and phone competition, it would be hugely beneficial for them.

Unless Apple comes up with a novel memory, which I wouldn’t put beyond Cupertino, it makes more sense to participate in economies of scale.

Apple doesn't make their own CPUs, they just design them (using ARM IP). It's TSMC that makes them. The bottleneck with RAM is the manufacturing side.

Memory designs are pretty entrenched with the various patents involved... I've said a few times that I don't know why Intel hasn't gotten back into DRAM production with their fabs. I suspect they may be contractually limited when they sold off their memory businesses.

Apple normally just does prepayment for capacity- funding the capital for the production line they need

Alas RAM is basically a commodity product, unless they could have some design advantage over others like the A and M series chips, there is little incentive to go into RAM.

If Apple had the manufacturing capabilities then sure, but they would still be running into the same resource constraints for inputs that everyone else is having nowadays.

At the moment, there are no solutions only responses.

It would take 5-10 years to design and verify a RAM design that comes anywhere close to the performance of modern day memory. Plus millions in NRE.