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DRAM Price-Fixing Lawsuit: Samsung, SK Hynix & Micron
Antitrust · Lawsuit Filed
Samsung, SK Hynix & Micron Hit With DRAM Price-Fixing Class Action as RAM Prices Soar Nearly 700%
Allegations Only · No Settlement Yet
This article describes a class action complaint. The statements below are unproven<br>allegations. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have not been found liable in this case,<br>there is no certified class, and nothing to claim at this time. This page is<br>informational and is not legal advice.
What Is This About?
A group of consumers and small computer-building businesses has filed a proposed antitrust class action against the world's three dominant memory chip makers — Samsung (Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and its U.S. arm Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.), SK Hynix (SK Hynix Inc. and SK Hynix America Inc.), and Micron Technology, Inc. The complaint alleges these companies, which it says together account for more than 90% of the world's DRAM, coordinated to restrict the supply of conventional (commodity) DRAM and drive up prices for the memory found in nearly every laptop, desktop, phone, and server.
The complaint, captioned Garciaguirre, et al. v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., et al., Case No. 5:26-cv-06345, was filed on June 25, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and demands a jury trial. The named plaintiffs bring the case on behalf of themselves and a proposed class of indirect purchasers. None of the defendants has been found liable in this case, and every claim described below is an unproven allegation.
Status<br>Complaint Filed<br>Proposed class action · Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., et al. · filed June 25, 2026 (N.D. Cal.)
Allegation<br>Coordinated DRAM supply restriction & price inflation<br>Suit says the three makers behind 90%+ of DRAM cut and withheld conventional memory supply while contract prices rose roughly 697% from Q3 2024 to Q1 2026
Can I Claim?<br>No — nothing to claim yet<br>No settlement, no fund, no claim form at this stage
What the Lawsuit Alleges
The case centers on what the complaint calls conventional or "commodity" DRAM — the standardized memory built to industry (JEDEC) specifications and sold for ordinary use, including the DDR4 and DDR5 modules in computers, the LPDDR memory in phones, and the memory in data-center servers. According to the suit, because a chip built to a given specification performs the same no matter which of the three firms made it, buyers treat commodity DRAM as interchangeable, and no other product can substitute for it. The complaint distinguishes this from high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a specialized, higher-priced product stacked for AI accelerators that it says is cut from the same limited wafer capacity.
Plaintiffs allege that, beginning in October 2022, the three companies pursued a coordinated program of supply restriction rather than competing. The complaint points to a series of parallel moves it says make economic sense only if the firms were acting in concert: simultaneous production and capital-spending cuts in late 2022 and early 2023; a shared pivot of wafer capacity toward HBM (which, on Micron's own description, allegedly means giving up roughly three bits of conventional memory for each bit of HBM); a coordinated wind-down of older DDR3 and DDR4 lines despite ongoing demand; and a refusal to expand commodity DRAM output even as prices set records. The suit also alleges the companies imposed near-identical customer "vetting" on orders during the shortage and publicly signaled "supply discipline" to one another through earnings calls.
The complaint singles out two 2025 developments. It alleges that around October 2025, Samsung and SK Hynix reportedly agreed to supply OpenAI's "Stargate" data-center project with a volume of DRAM wafers that — if fully implemented — the suit estimates at up to roughly 40% of global output committed to a single customer. And it alleges that in December 2025, at the peak of the consumer shortage, Micron announced it would shut down Crucial, its long-running direct-to-consumer memory brand — a channel the complaint says a company competing for the shortage would have used to sell into record prices, not surrendered. Plaintiffs frame these as consistent with an agreement rather than independent competition. Each of these is an unproven allegation, and the companies have publicly attributed the same conduct to surging AI demand.
According to the complaint, the result was a price spike far beyond anything a competitive market would sustain: conventional DRAM contract prices allegedly rose about 171.8% year-over-year by the third quarter of 2025, then roughly 50% more in Q4 2025 and about 93%–98% more in Q1 2026 — a compounded increase of approximately 697% from...