Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron face US class action alleging DRAM supply collusion

Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have reportedly been hit with a federal class-action antitrust lawsuit alleging the three memory makers colluded to restrict DRAM supply and drive prices higher. The complaint was filed June 25 in California.

Seventeen named plaintiffs — a mix of consumers and small businesses — reportedly accuse the companies of fixing the supply and price of dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, starting in 2022. Together the three control more than 90% of global DRAM sales, the complaint is said to argue, and conventional memory prices rose roughly 700% over four years.

The case, captioned Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics, was reportedly filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by the law firms Hagens Berman and Bathaee Dunne. According to the reported filing, the companies used the industry’s shift to High-Bandwidth Memory, the stacked DRAM that feeds AI accelerators, as cover to deliberately curtail output of older DDR3 and DDR4 chips. Plaintiffs are said to seek a court order halting the alleged supply restrictions and treble damages.

The allegations remain unproven. Samsung and SK Hynix were found to have engaged in DRAM price-fixing in the United States in the early 2000s — SK Hynix paid a $185 million fine in 2005 and Samsung paid $300 million — a history the new complaint invokes.

The three companies have not publicly responded to the reported complaint. Past DRAM antitrust cases have set a high bar, requiring plaintiffs to show coordination rather than parallel pricing.