A new class action lawsuit accuses Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron of fixing RAM prices and deliberately strangling supply during what the media has dubbed "RAMageddon." This is not the first time these exact three companies have faced this exact accusation. Two of them have actually pleaded guilty to it before.
As reported by Law360, the suit – filed by a proposed class of individual and business consumers – accuses the trio of working together to fix component prices while reducing supply, specifically by cutting production of DDR3 and DDR4 RAM while pivoting most of their manufacturing toward HBM, the high-cost, high-bandwidth memory that AI datacentres are currently throwing money at.
What the Lawsuit Claims
The complaint's central argument is that this isn't how a competitive market is supposed to behave. In a healthy market, rapidly rising prices should pull more supply toward the product commanding those prices – at least one of the three companies should have looked at DRAM prices climbing and decided to flood that market to undercut the others. "That did not happen," the suit states. Instead, all three simultaneously pivoted away from conventional DRAM and toward HBM, which the complaint frames as...
