Just causing a shortage isn't a bullwhip though That depends. Either way, what I'm describing are my own observations in Factorio are those instances where sho

Just causing a shortage isn't a bullwhip though That depends. Either way, what I'm describing are my own observations in Factorio are those instances where shortages actually do end up causing bullwhips. And shortages are not always easy to correct: A "mere bottleneck" is what we have in the chip shortage. Production capacity is the bottleneck, and correcting it is complicated. That is what I also observed in Factorio: A small increase in demand that exceeds supply creates a bottleneck because production can't keep up. It propagates throughout the system causing other shortages where the components 4 or 5 layers down the chain need the scarce material. And also causes surpluses on multiple levels because components can't be used to make the components that also need the scarce material. Fixing the shortage isn't always easy. If you need a lot of a specific material to build the production capacity to fill the shortage, that may reveal yet another bottleneck in producing another material, and so on. IRL, it's possible something like this could occur with the increased uptick in fab production. ASML might be a bottleneck in providing drastically more equipment for more fabs. Or someone up the supply chain that feeds them resources could be bottlenecked. I guess we'll see how it plays out though.