Samsung, SK hynix and Micron have been sued in a federal court in California over alleged collusion and price-fixing of DRAM.
The lawsuit seeks to represent consumers and businesses that bought products containing commodity DRAM during the latest price surge.
It claims Samsung, SK hynix and Micron used their coordinated “pivot” to HBM as cover to keep commodity DRAM production artificially low.
HBM is the pricey memory feeding AI kit, while older DDR3 and DDR4 are still needed by plenty of less glamorous machines. According to the complaint, the shift allowed the trio to squeeze the supply of older DRAM formats and push prices up by about 700 per cent over four years.
The lawsuit calls the result a “RAMpocalypse”, which is daft branding but rather less funny if you are buying memory.
The Fruity Cargo Cult Apple gets dragged in because Job’s Mob recently blamed soaring memory costs for raising iPad and Mac prices. The complaint points to past antitrust trouble to paint a pattern, rather than treating this as a one-off bout of market weirdness.
Samsung and SK hynix pleaded guilty to criminal price-fixing charges brought by the US Department of Justice in the 2000s. Those cases produced $731m in fines and prison sentences for several executives.
The new lawsuit lands as Lenovo and others warn that expensive memory could be the “new normal”. Those warnings have a useful sales side effect, since buyers may panic now rather than wait for prices to calm down.
Jefferies is not expecting much calming down anyway. The firm forecasts memory prices to rise 40 to 50 per cent in the third quarter of 2026 compared with the current quarter. It expects another 30 to 40 per cent sequential jump in the fourth quarter of this year., Jefferies expects a further year-on-year rise of 40 to 45 per cent, with prices only easing somewhat in 2028.
That leaves memory buyers stuck between AI demand, tight supply and lawyers trying to decide whether a market squeeze was merely convenient.
