RAMpocalypse, Now With Lawyers - ByteHaven - Where I ramble about bytes

ByteHaven - Where I ramble about bytes

RAMpocalypse, Now With Lawyers

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series.<br>A class action lawsuit was filed in California on June 25th against Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, the three companies that dominate global DRAM production. Counterpoint Research puts their Q1 2026 revenue share at Samsung 38%, SK Hynix 29%, and Micron 22% — roughly 90% combined. The core allegation: that they coordinated to slash conventional DDR3 and DDR4 supply while pivoting production toward High Bandwidth Memory, the stacked memory that AI datacenters are consuming at a scale that would have seemed fictional three years ago. As a result, consumer memory prices have risen something like 700% over four years. Consoles cost more. Laptops cost more. Phones cost more. Apple has already raised the price of its cheapest MacBook Pro by $400, to $1,999, citing memory and storage costs it could no longer absorb. Xbox raised prices. Valve announced that their Steam Machine pricing target was no longer viable. Corsair started putting tamper-evident seals on RAM packaging because scammers are now apparently worth worrying about for memory sticks.<br>The frustration driving this lawsuit is completely understandable. I feel it too.<br>The lawsuit itself, though, I think is going to have a hard time. Micron has already denied the allegations and said it intends to defend itself.<br>This Isn't a "Screw you to Customers" Situation<br>Here's the thing that gets lost when prices go this sideways: sometimes markets do genuinely terrible things to consumers without anyone in a boardroom actually deciding to screw you. This is one of those situations, and it matters for understanding why the lawsuit is an uphill climb.<br>Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are publicly traded companies. They have shareholders, boards, and quarterly earnings calls. They've collectively shifted roughly 80% of their manufacturing capacity toward HBM — the memory type that AI accelerators and datacenter GPUs require. Micron went far enough that they shut down Crucial, their consumer DRAM brand, at what the lawsuit itself describes as "the most profitable price point in its history."<br>The complaint calls this "contrary to all economic and business logic." I'd argue the opposite. HBM margins relative to commodity DDR4 are apparently so substantial that Crucial at peak profitability still couldn't compete with the opportunity cost of producing it. That's not a conspiracy — that's a capital allocation decision any CFO with a pulse would make when the AI buildout is buying up memory at a scale Sam Altman once described with a $1.4 trillion letter of intent. (That number got quietly revised down, but the direction of it tells you everything about the demand pressure these companies are sitting inside.) The boards of these companies would be facing shareholder revolts — possibly derivative suits of their own — if they hadn't chased those margins.<br>The problem for consumers is real. The mechanism isn't malice. It's that the AI buildout is simply a larger and more immediate customer than we are, and in an oligopoly with three players and no meaningful path for new competitors to enter, there's nothing to check that.<br>What Actual DRAM Price-Fixing Looks Like<br>The lawsuit leans heavily on history, and the history is real — so it's worth being precise about what actually happened, because the 2005 case looks very different from the current situation on the mechanics that matter in court.<br>The DRAM price-fixing conspiracy that the DOJ prosecuted ran from 1998 to 2002 and was a genuine international cartel. Five companies — Samsung, Hynix, Micron, Infineon, and Elpida — pleaded guilty to explicit coordination. Executives from competing companies communicating across company lines to fix prices. Documented agreements. An international conspiracy the DOJ could point to with actual evidence. When the grand jury subpoenas hit, a Micron regional sales manager was charged with obstruction of justice for destroying and altering documents — which tells you something about what those documents contained. Samsung paid $300 million. Hynix paid $185 million. Infineon paid $160 million, which was the third-largest antitrust fine in US history at the time. European regulators separately went after nine manufacturers for another €331 million in 2010.<br>Micron paid nothing and faced no criminal charges — because they blew the whistle on the cartel and cooperated with prosecutors. They were participants who turned government witness. The Samsung executive who pleaded guilty and did eight months in federal prison was later promoted to President of Samsung Germany, then President of Samsung Europe, which is a whole separate conversation about how seriously these companies internalize lessons learned, but that's a tangent.<br>The point is: that case had evidence. Actual cross-company coordination. Document...