Believe it or not it happened before. The RAM prices were inflated before. These companies were accused before.
The class-action lawsuit accusing Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron of rigging the DRAM market would be easy to dismiss as a long-shot payday grab, except for one detail that changes the whole complexion of it. Two of the three defendants have done this before, and admitted it. Filed June 25 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California as Garciaguirre v. Samsung, the suit brings together 17 plaintiffs, a mix of individuals and small PC retailers, who allege the trio coordinated to choke conventional DRAM supply and inflate prices that have climbed roughly 700% over four years. The companies together control around 90% of the global DRAM market, and the complaint invokes Section 1 of the Sherman Act, the core US anti-collusion statute. On its own, that's a serious but speculative claim. But there is also a history here.
The prior conduct the filing leans on is genuine, though it's worth getting the specifics right. Back in the mid-2000s, following a Department of Justice investigation, Samsung and SK Hynix both pleaded guilty to criminally fixing DRAM prices, in a scandal that produced a combined total of around $731 million in fines across the companies involved and, notably, sent several executives to prison. SK Hynix alone paid $185 million in April 2005. There's a wrinkle worth flagging for accuracy, since Micron, the third defendant here, was actually a cooperator in that earlier case rather than a convicted party, having come forward under a leniency arrangement. So the "they've done it before" argument applies cleanly to two of the three, not all of them. Even with that caveat, a documented pattern of two dominant players in this exact market having already pleaded guilty to fixing prices in this exact product is the kind of history that makes a judge and jury far more willing to entertain that it could be happening again.
What the Suit Actually Alleges
The heart of the complaint is a claim about behaviour that, the plaintiffs argue, makes no sense unless it's coordinated. Normally, when prices in a market spike the way DRAM prices have, you'd expect each company to race to produce more of the suddenly-lucrative product to grab market share from rivals, which in turn drags prices back down. The suit alleges the opposite happened. Rather than compete to flood the market, the three companies allegedly moved in lockstep to exit older DDR3 and DDR4 production and pivot toward high-bandwidth memory for AI data centres, using that HBM transition as what the filing frames as a pretext to "decrease and lock up conventional DRAM supply" while prices soared. The complaint points to Micron shutting down its consumer-facing Crucial DRAM business in 2025, at what it claims was the most profitable point in that business's history, as an example of a company walking away from money in a way that only makes sense if everyone's walking away together. There's a damning anecdote in the wider reporting too, with a Valve engineer claiming suppliers "never talk to you again" if you refuse their asking price, which is exactly the kind of take-it-or-leave-it dynamic a cartel produces.
The Moat That Makes It Possible
The structural argument of the whole lawsuit is why nobody can simply undercut the three and break the alleged arrangement. Building a DRAM fabrication plant reportedly costs somewhere between $15 and $20 billion and takes years of specialised development to bring online, which means there is essentially no realistic path for a new competitor to enter the market and "discipline" the incumbents by offering cheaper memory. That barrier to entry is the moat, and it's what allows a three-company oligopoly to sustain prices. It's a genuinely compelling logical structure, since it explains how prices could rise this dramatically and stay there. It's also, conveniently, the exact same market structure that makes the AI-demand explanation perfectly plausible too.
Why This Is Still an Uphill Fight
For all the weight the prior convictions add, this is far from a sure thing, and it's worth being honest about that. The case currently hangs on what observers have described as "they've done it before" energy without a clear smoking gun, and the defendants have a genuinely strong innocent explanation sitting right there in plain sight. The AI boom is real, HBM genuinely does command far higher margins, and redirecting capacity toward the highest bidder is, as plenty of commentators have pointed out, just ordinary business logic rather than conspiracy. The companies have publicly maintained they operate independently, and proving deliberate coordination rather than three firms separately making the same obvious profit-maximising choice is a famously difficult legal task. Unless Bathaee Dunne, the firm behind the suit, can surface internal communications showing the three actually agreed to use the AI build-out as cover, the chipmakers have a credible defence.
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