The three companies that make nearly all the world’s memory chips are now facing a class action lawsuit in the US, accused of quietly choking off DRAM supply to drive prices through the roof.Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron—the trio behind almost the entire global DRAM market — stand accused of coordinating production cuts while memory costs climbed at a pace the lawsuit describes as having “mind-blowing scale and rapidity.”Filed on June 25 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California under case number 3:26-cv-06345, the complaint lands at a moment when RAM prices have hit historic highs and consumers are already feeling the squeeze on everything from laptops to game consoles.
What the lawsuit actually accuses the three of doing
The complaint alleges that the three firms worked together to fix prices while reducing the supply of conventional memory. Specifically, it claims they cut back on DDR3 and DDR4 RAM and pushed most of their production toward HBM—a pricier, high-bandwidth form of 3D-stacked DRAM that AI data centres are hungry for. The result, the suit argues, is that ordinary buyers paid inflated prices for a market deliberately “crippled by the behavior of DRAM oligopolists.”There’s an economic logic the plaintiffs lean on, too. In a healthy market, soaring prices should pull more supply toward them—at least one company should have ramped up output to grab customers. The suit says that simply never happened. Instead, the trio kept squeezing supply, in some cases junking conventional DRAM channels altogether while publicly steering resources to HBM.
Why no rival can step in to undercut them
Part of what makes the allegation stick, according to the filing, is that nobody else can realistically challenge these three. Building a single DRAM fabrication plant can cost tens of billions of dollars and take years to finish. Even then, the manufacturing know-how represents “decades of accumulated trade secrets,” and US export controls keep Chinese rivals from getting current-generation equipment. The practical upshot, the suit claims, is that when the big three restrict supply, no outsider can expand output to bring prices down.The case is being heard by Judge Noel Wise, with attorneys from Bathaee Dunne LLP representing a group of plaintiffs that includes individual consumers and small PC repair and fabrication businesses.
This isn’t the first time these names have come up
The lawsuit points out that this is familiar territory. Back in 2005, Samsung pleaded guilty and paid a $300 million fine over what the US Department of Justice called an international conspiracy to fix DRAM prices. Hynix pleaded guilty around the same time and was fined $185 million, while Micron reportedly dodged a penalty by reporting the conduct and cooperating with prosecutors. China also investigated the three when prices spiked between 2016 and 2018. As the complaint puts it, this is the third such cycle in the same market among the same firms.The timing stings for consumers. Apple raised prices across nearly its whole hardware lineup the same day, hiking MacBooks and iPads by up to 20%. And it didn’t just hit customer, the new triggered a 6% stock drop—its worst single day in over a year. Microsoft has also raised Xbox prices by $100 to $150, citing memory and storage costs that have “increased by more than 2. 5x.” Valve, Sony and Nintendo have all bumped hardware costs too, and analysts warn more increases could follow if the shortage drags on—which, by every available signal, it will.
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