I know this is said in hindsight, but the way the first paragraph is written sets off alarm bells of weird reporting, and I imagine probably was what triggered you to look into it further.

ASUS plans to produce RAM amid shortage problems, hoping to ease the rising costs of laptops and gaming PCs.

While I get that Asus naturally would want to be competitive, why would they (from an economic standpoint) care about ‘easing the rising costs’ of their products. They would have actual motives like trying to be independent of these major memory manufacturers.

Reports say the company is preparing to manufacture DDR5 memory by 2026.

2026 is in less than 5 days. If this instead said “by the end of 2026” or longer I’d have a better time believing that claim.