Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron were sued on June 25th in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where 17 plaintiffs accuse the three memory makers of illegally coordinating to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices that the complaint says have risen roughly 700% over four years. The class action, filed as Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics and assigned to Judge Noel Wise, invokes Section 1 of the Sherman Act and targets companies that together hold around 90% of the global DRAM market. Samsung and SK hynix have pleaded guilty to criminal DRAM price fixing once before, with the latter paying a $185 million fine in April 2005.
The complaint argues that the three companies used a coordinated shift toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM that feeds AI accelerators, as a cover to curtail production of older DDR3 and DDR4 modules. That contraction in commodity DRAM, the plaintiffs argue, pushed prices to record highs while no rival could step in: building a new DRAM fab costs tens of billions and takes years, leaving the incumbents free to cut output without fear of being undercut.
