Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

https://en.sedaily.com/international/2026/06/29/samsung-sk-hynix-micron-sued-in-us-over-memory-price-fixing

by donohoe • 24 days ago

428 195 24 days ago

en.sedaily.com

tommy_axle• 23 days ago

It wouldn't be a first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

xxs• 23 days ago

I thought the title missed the year (in parenthesis)

theandrewbailey• 23 days ago

It's been happening once every decade or so. I'm not surprised that they are being sued again.

jauntywundrkind• 23 days ago

Total fines of about half a billion. Thats not nothing but it also does not seem like a real disincentive.

Samsung is about to hand out ~$26B in bonuses. SK Hynix something similar-ish.

tyre• 23 days ago

Yes, but for context Samsung is a massive chaebol. You need to compare it to the business unit in question.

It’s different to, say, Google’s vertical monopoly in advertising where that’s most of their revenue.

SideQuark• 23 days ago

True. From that page RAM companies have been sued and found innocent before:

“ The district court ruled in favor of Samsung, Hynix, and Micron and dismissed the lawsuit. This dismissal was affirmed on appeal by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in March 2022 that the plaintiffs did not offer sufficient plausible evidence for their allegations to make a case under the Sherman Antitrust Act and that the district court properly dismissed the lawsuit.”

0xy• 23 days ago

I think it's incredibly unlikely to be deliberate price fixing this time. Demand is too high.

Cthulhu_2• 23 days ago

Two things can be true; they could theoretically make agreements to limit supply, like the OPEC does to exert control over international oil prices. But the OPEC is all above board and there's plenty of international competition on the oil market.

But the challenge is in proving it.

ksec4• 23 days ago

It isn't like OPEC and oil where you can turn on and off bumping out from the ground.

The most expensive foundry / fab isn't the leading edge, it is the "empty" ones. You can't have a fab sitting idle.

mDyJzDPmBdG• 23 days ago

There is no reason for there not to be a price fixing. But the OpenAI's announcement from 2025-10-01 about buying 40% of supply, removes any need for collusion. It was a public signal for everyone to rise prices, one that each company could figure on their own. And it will be very hard to prove otherwise.

jackb40405• 23 days ago

Prices skyrocketing create a perfect opportunity to slip in a little artificial bump and hope everyone blames the market. See also: egg prices in 2024.

russli19935• 23 days ago

if demand is too high, the market will adjust by adding supply. If Apple can't take the price of memory, why don't they make memory themselves. Oh no, the technical and manufacturing know-how is a barrier to entry and there is no talent available to make it. That is memory or semi companies' competitive advantages and their pricing power. It also takes Phd degrees to work at hardware companies. You can't have people doing leetcode for 2 months and todo apps and getting into the field and make 300k a year and hardware engineers wih Phds making 100k before this boom. It is long overdue for a rebalance of pricing power between hardware and software companies

Danox7• 23 days ago

Between TSMC, Intel and Apple memory can be designed, engineered and made, and that doesn’t even include the Chinese who will probably use this to take over a large part of the memory market worldwide?, the three-headed memory cartel is unsustainable, they have two to four years maximum and that’s it.

cbg0• 23 days ago

This was attempted before in 2022 but fell apart because plaintiff couldn't show an agreement took place https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2022/03/07/2...

mywittyname3• 23 days ago

The arguments made by the Plaintiff are thoroughly convincing to me. The fact that those 8 points are not enough to convict indicate the industry is fucked. Of course the defendants didn't leave a paper trail - they've already been convicted of collusion before.

It's the people and country that suffer when our government fails to ensure markets are free and fair.

Stitch42233• 23 days ago

If there is no agreement, then the magic term is "tacit collusion."

Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. If suppliers have sufficiently different products, they can make some more expensive, others cheaper; on average, everybody pays more. A high barrier to entry might help such practices.

That doesn't mean I'm saying this is what is happening. Sometimes things just suck, and somebody bought the world's supply of RAM wafers to use as frisbees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion

xiphias22• 23 days ago

,,The plaintiffs claimed the three companies reduced D-RAM supply under the pretext of transitioning to high-bandwidth memory (HBM). "The D-RAM oligopoly companies systematically coordinated the shift to HBM and the discontinuation of DDR3 and DDR4," they said. They added that Apple's recent sweeping product price increases were the trigger for the lawsuit.''

How can they do price fixing and discontinuing a product at the same time? It just looks like some companies are angry that AI / VC industry is outpricing them.

sysguest• 23 days ago

hmm maybe the plaintiff should sue nvidia?

dcrazy5• 23 days ago

An agreement to restrict production, sales, or output is just as illegal as direct price fixing, because reducing the supply of a product or service drives up its price. For example, the FTC challenged an agreement among competing oil importers to restrict the supply of lubricants by refusing to import or sell those products in Puerto Rico. The competitors were seeking to pressure the legislature to repeal an environmental deposit fee on lubricants, and warned of lubricant shortages and higher prices.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

xiphias22• 23 days ago

But Micron didn't restrict the output: it stopped producing DDR2-3-4 completely, so it's not profiting from DDR customers at all.

Danox7• 23 days ago

People have a tendency to get upset when someone waves a future IOU intent order from another buyer in front of you, one that isn’t taking delivery anytime soon and then proceeds to tell you you must pay more…

glimshe• 23 days ago

Everybody in our industry loves fat margins. But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.

gruez6• 23 days ago

But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.

Yeah that's how law works. Everyone likes money, but that doesn't mean it's fine to steal money. Yes, even from maligned entities like "big tech" or "private equity"

lenerdenator• 23 days ago

There's "fat margins" and then there's the kind of margins that tech industry shareholders expect.

OpenAI's original corporate agreements capped its returns at 100x, which is seen as too paltry for its current holders, so they scrapped those to prepare for an IPO [0]

That is, in a word, insane.

[0] https://abhs.in/blog/openai-for-profit-conversion-ipo-develo...

Danox7• 23 days ago

A fat margin is fine. What’s not fine is saying you don’t have any and you don’t plan to make any more.

Neywiny3• 23 days ago

HBM is also DRAM. I also think it's kind of a weak argument to say that them discontinuing ddr3 (which while in use still today in industrial/embedded was on the way out for consumers 10 years ago) and ddr4 which last had consumer CPUs for it 3 years ago is meaningful. What we need now is ddr5. Turning off the old fabs and moving those resources including people to ddr5 is a good thing. That's not price fixing. It's possible price fixing is in play, but discontinuing products people objectively don't use as much anymore isn't it.

cosmic_cheese6• 23 days ago

Switching off DDR3 manufacturing I can understand, but DDR4 machines are still quite relevant and usable… Ryzen 5000 series boxes for example don’t feel meaningfully weaker than they did when new. My 5950X tower certainly doesn’t, and it’d really be nice to be able to upgrade its RAM should I need to because it will continue to be useful for quite some time.

AMD just re-released their 5800X3D for AM4 board users who wish to upgrade which is further evidence that shutting off DDR4 production is premature.

zarzavat• 23 days ago

They're running a business not a charity. Their job is to manufacture what the market as a whole demands. If they can make more money making HBM than DDR4 then they have to make HBM. Why would a business go out of its way to make less money?

Neywiny3• 23 days ago

Not to be a bootlicker but AMD releasing a product doesn't mean another company should make more DDR4. That's not price fixing. In the embedded space it's sadly very common for a part to be compatible with a very low number of options (shout out to cellular/admux RAM on the STM32H745 nucleo). That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

thewebguyd2• 23 days ago

My 5950X tower certainly doesn’t

That's what I have in my gaming tower, and yeah I feel zero pressing need to upgrade. I did manage to put 64GB of DDR4 in it just before prices went totally bonkers, thankfully. Where I'm falling behind is my GPU I'm still on an nvidia 1660 super, but I just can't justify paying what they cost right now.

I would gain pretty much nothing moving to a newer board w/ DDR5.

toast0• 23 days ago

DDR4 machines are relevant and usable, but it's pretty unusual that new systems on older ram are still big sellers. The 5800x3d was originally released in 2022, AM5 processors were also originally released in 2022. We'll probably see Zen6 soon, the third generation on AM5... I don't think AMD released new AM3 processors after the introduction of AM4, certainly not when Zen3 was coming soon.

When making long term plans in 2022, I don't think anyone expected DDR4 to need significant production in 2026. Since ram makers can pretty much sell whatever they make in today's marketplace, it makes sense (for those fabs that can) to stop making DDR4 and repurpose those fabs to make newer generation ram.

pdimitar3• 23 days ago

Dropping DDR-4 is anything but meaningful. It'll easily last 10 more years, machines from this gen are still much more affordable and quite powerful. In fact for most dev and gaming workflows the difference between the DDR-4 and DDR-5 generation of hardware is more or less negligible. I am exaggerating a bit -- but really, not too much.

Of course it might be a ploy to sheep-herd consumers and companies towards the expensive DDR-5. I would not put that below the ring of RAM producers.

gruez6• 23 days ago

Dropping DDR-4 is anything but meaningful. It'll easily last 10 more years, machines from this gen are still much more affordable and quite powerful. In fact for most dev and gaming workflows the difference between the DDR-4 and DDR-5 generation of hardware is more or less negligible. I am exaggerating a bit -- but really, not too much.

How much % of the DRAM market do you think is made from computer enthusiasts upgrading their Zen 1/2 CPUs to Zen 3? Note intel and AMD both switched to DDR5 well before the exit from DDR3/DDR4 ("2024-2025", according to the complaint).

bogwog• 23 days ago

It's easy to see why your argument is wrong with a simple hypothetical: what if they were still making DDR4 today? Would people still buy it?

The answer is an obvious "fuck yeah", even if you ignore the DDR5 price gouging. People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware, and that hardware is still extremely relevant.

So if there's a market for it, but none of the suppliers are trying to sell to it... Wtf is happening? Basic capitalism logic says any rational supplier would sell DDR4 for easy profits, meeting an unmet demand. That it isn't happen points to some kind of collusion, IMO.

dcrazy5• 23 days ago

People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware

The question is whether there’s enough meaningful demand for aftermarket DDR4 upgrades to make it worthwhile to a manufacturer to keep producing DDR4 instead of switching to HBM and DDR5.

Micron claimed retail is a rounding error, a market not worth serving. So you’d presumably need to find industrial buyers who would be willing to buy DDR4.

revolvingthrow• 23 days ago

Because the market pays less for DDR4 than for HBM (or DDR5), and since HBM is heavily modified, vertically stacked DRAM, it competes for the same raw inputs and fab space than DDR4 used.

If I can produce DDR4 for modest profit or HBM for a lot more profit I will obviously produce HBM. And given physical realities producing HBM takes from existing DDR4 production capacity. Worse still, it takes roughly 3GB of ram to produce 1GB of hbm iirc.

microgpt3• 23 days ago

Basic capitalism logic is that if you think it's stupid, you put your money where your mouth is, set up a DRAM fab, and get rich.

15155• 23 days ago

objectively don't use as much anymore

Consumers use these every single day in embedded devices without knowing it.

I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the embedded DDR3/DDR4 market greatly exceeds the number of consumer desktop computing devices in terms of "devices with memory" (not in sheer IC count or nominal size though.)

The level of design effort and PCB expense to go from DDR3 to DDR5 is enormous.

nubinetwork• 23 days ago

I was hoping it was a typo, and they actually meant 4 and 5... I didn't even know people made products that still use ddr3.

Neywiny3• 23 days ago

Especially industrially, ddr3l is just fine. At a certain point you don't need the speed of newer generations, and buying new idk lpddr5x/t controllers for 30 year old process nodes just isn't worth it. Until ddr3/l to EOL from everybody. The big 3 aren't the only memory fabs.

cududa• 23 days ago

Embedded devices absolutely need DDR3 and DDR4

WarmWash• 23 days ago

Just a reminder that anyone can file a lawsuit over anything, and the initial complaint is written by lawyers and reads with tabloid levels of sensationalism and allegation. The goal being to maximize the appearance of harm as much as possible so the suit has the greatest chance of sticking.

It is not in any way, shape, or form a ruling much less even a piece of well researched work. It's "my side of the story that makes me look perfect, with lawyers turning the heat up to 11"

Cthulhu_2• 23 days ago

Honestly a lot of lawsuits feel like they just want the other party to pay them (settle) to make the lawsuit go away, even if there is no case; what are the repercussions for a frivolous lawsuit?

vablings4• 23 days ago

Realistically very few. The plaintiff carries the burden of proving the claim, but they are afforded the power of the law to do so via discovery. The defendant then has to spend a large number of legal resources refusing the claims and also providing the evidence required.

If the plaintiff loses the lawsuit a countersuit is pretty unlikely to succeed unless the lawyer participates in gross misconduct. Generally, countersuits are filed more to put the original plaintiff on the defense and don't result in a large judgement.

If you are operating in good faith, then you are pretty insular from kickback as a plaintiff

lotsofpulp• 23 days ago

what are the repercussions for a frivolous lawsuit?

None, hence the high price of liability baked into basically everything in America. And not just in nominal prices, but in terms of things like restricting access to spaces, restricting access to information, etc.

SoftTalker• 23 days ago

In reality a lawsuit needs to have some basis. The bar might be low but judges frown on having their time wasted with a truly frivolous claim or a claim with no clear damages or harm shown.

buckle8017• 23 days ago

That might have been true at some point in the past and the judiciary might even feel that way still.

However the practical penalty for filling absurd lawsuits is zero unless you do it repeatedly to random people for a decade.

Absolutely nothing bad will happen to the plaintiff or the lawyers representing them in this case.

Western legal systems are broken.

cute_boi• 23 days ago

I think the only solution to this issue is China. If CXMT can supply, it will put all these monopolies in check.

Arubis2• 23 days ago

That’s a nice short-term solution. How do you envision adding an infinitely-deep-pocketed state-sponsored supplier to the mix over the longer term?

jackb40405• 23 days ago

What would the issue be, in the long term? I'm struggling to see a downside to more manufacturing capacity

dabinat2• 23 days ago

Even if CXMT can only sell in China, that reduces the amount of memory China needs to buy from other manufacturers, thus benefiting everyone.

russli19935• 23 days ago

cxmt is also selling their memory similar to the big three. No one hardware company in their right mind will sell their products not as high as possible after you learn how much harder hardware engineer and fab people work for.

jackb40405• 23 days ago

"As high as possible" is a function of scale though. There is only so much global demand for memory at a given price point. If CXMT determine that by increasing supply they can increase profit even if it lowers prices, then they will do so within their ability.

EDIT: This is also semiconductor-specific. Because there's little additional cost to doubling the output, ramping up production is the hard part

varispeed4• 23 days ago

Price fixing is legal as long as your are doing it in the open. In the UK it is called "price match" and eg. if supermarket says they keep prices matched to their competitor. No regulator raises an eyebrow.

So here Samsung and SK Hynix could say they price match to Micron and they are in the clear.

vablings4• 23 days ago

That is not what price fixing actually is. In the UK "price matching" is a one-to-many relationship meaning that the price of goods is set to the "lowest available"

Price fixing is a many-to-one all the manufactures agree to the highest prices they all agree on and set it there.

varispeed4• 23 days ago

You are arguing semantics. Effect is the same.

gruez6• 23 days ago

Price fixing is legal as long as your are doing it in the open. In the UK it is called "price match" and eg. if supermarket says they keep prices matched to their competitor. No regulator raises an eyebrow.

No, the key term is "collusion", which could be done in the open or not. If a competitor told you they were unilaterally raising prices in secret, that would still be legal. Where you get into trouble is if you are cooperating to set prices. And no, this is all determined by a judge so cute workarounds like "I'm telling my competitors that I'm raising prices then gauging his body language" won't work.

bryanlarsen4• 23 days ago

I worked in a small town gas station as a kid. We always phoned our competitor to let them know when we were changing our prices, and they extended us the same courtesy. Usually we followed them, but sometimes we didn't.

Gas prices are posted on massive highly visible signs and are public information. This wasn't collusion, it was a sign of intense but friendly competition.

dcrazy5• 23 days ago

Price fixing is legal as long as your are doing it in the open.

In the U.S., competitors are allowed to act in similar ways in response to economic realities, as long as they each arrive at that decision independently. But publicly anchoring your price to a competitor’s is potentially illegal.

Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, orinferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.

[Emphasis added]

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

bryanlarsen4• 23 days ago

Identical prices are often a sign of intense competition. Every gas station on a corner has the same price because it's a highly competitive market not because of collusion. The prices of the much more lucrative chocolate bars inside the gas stations are less likely to be identical.

jackb40405• 23 days ago

Price match creates downward pressure, nobody is gonna sue over lower prices.

This is like if you showed a supermarket that their competitor's oranges were more expensive, and they "matched" by raising their prices for everyone.

varispeed4• 23 days ago

That is your assumption without evidence. Once the targeted market knows others are tracking the price, it can up the price without fear competing market will undercut.

tribal808• 23 days ago

everything is political

mattfrommars• 23 days ago

Anyone know what will lawfirms cut if they win from the lawsuit?

How many millions are we talking.

bilekas4• 23 days ago

I mean there was an attempt before, and maybe I'm wrong but I'm sure they were fined in 2010 at least in the EU, this seems to be round 2 of their 'Memory Cartel' after learning some lessons, realising all they need to do is keep supply as low as they want and allow the AI companies to spend hand over fist.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...

gruez6• 23 days ago

keep supply as low as they want and allow the AI companies to spend hand over fist

That's indistinguishable from not wanting to get burned by another semiconductor boom/bust cycle.

bilekas4• 23 days ago

I think they already know it's gonna take China a year or two to ramp up, so they're banking on that ?

mrtksn9• 23 days ago

What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction?

They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.

ksec4• 23 days ago

It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.

Depends if US can demand ASML which uses plenty of US tech inside. In reality even the DRAM and NAND supply chain has plenty of US technologies.

And you say Micron are US but they have lots of Fabs in Japan as well since they acquired Elpida.

mrtksn9• 23 days ago

Everyone is using something from someone, you can even argue that US owes India and Europe huge compensation because pretty much everything US did in the last half century was made using technology or people funded by those people. Johny Ive is British, Almost all the AI stuff is created by Europeans, Israelis, and Canadians - thus funded by their respective taxpayers.

The thing about the US losing its grip on the world and the collapse of the global world order means that the words on the paper don't mean much. Embargoes on Russia didn't mean much so Europeans are physically taking over their ships and Ukrainians are physically sinking the rest of their ships. In Iran nothing other than physically sinking ships and blowing up places meant anything.

Europeans can ship EUV machines because they are physically building them for people who will use these to physically build the most valuable products currently there is. US wasn't able to enforce its will to Iran, what if Koreans, Europeans and the Chinese decide that its not into their interest to act according to US courts?

bilekas4• 23 days ago

What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction?

They would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?

mrtksn9• 23 days ago

The market is the AI boom and the US is the host, they can sell the exact same stuff to someone else. What are the capitalists who fund the AI build up do? Invest in SaaS when they can't buy chips? I bet if something like that happens the chip manufacturers wouldn't end up with product they have no one to sell to.

dist-epoch2• 23 days ago

US is the vast majority of their market - Apple, hyper-scalers, AI labs

russli19935• 23 days ago

And hyper-scalers, Apple, AI labs all will die if memory makers can't sell to them?

mrtksn9• 23 days ago

Why can't they just buy the exact same product and install it in Kazakhstan or somewhere else?

russli19935• 23 days ago

memory is a commodity is laughable. Then software engineering is even more a commodity, the amount of engineering going into making memory chips the vast majority of people don't understand. There are a lot of software engineers getting this field after leetcoding and copy from hellointerview. Claude can write you an app in 30 minutes. Try build a lpddr5 dram chip in 30 minutes. Manufacturing know how itself is a specialty and barrier to entry.

AngryData• 23 days ago

I mean your view isn't flawless but overall I agree. Too many people think building things amount to spending money and completely overlook the thousands of people required who are not just unskilled labor hired off the street.

Danox7• 23 days ago

It’s a barrier, but not an insurmountable barrier. Most of the companies are somewhat lazy and somewhat cheap, but if circumstances change in the market, that make it untenable, they will take on making their own memory or making arrangements with someone else.

It’s been done with processors, modems, SSDs and many other specialized chips. The design and engineering part can already be done at several companies, they just elect not to do anything on the fab side. But they will, if they have to in the long run.

It takes two to four years and Five to twenty billion dollars. Some of the bigger companies, if pushed, particularly, if the alternative is getting chips from China, will do something on the fab side if they absolutely have to. They probably won’t live with the current conditions forever.

There was a company that had three companies say no over about 10 years, eventually, they made a decision to build their own processor known as the M-series…

zuzululu• 23 days ago

regime change in South Korea. President Lee Jae Myung isn't exactly popular among Washington circles

soraminazuki• 23 days ago

In the region are Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, and North Korea. Only incompetent idiots at the highest level of power would start off a whole new geopolitical disaster there by stabbing an ally, of all things. Who in the right mind would do such a ... ohhhh.

mywittyname3• 23 days ago

Micron is forced to stop under-investing in plants and will increase production. This will trigger everyone else to expand production and lower prices.

The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.

If Samsung and SK lose access to the US market, they'd be fucked long term. Micron would kill them selling at higher margins and higher volumes in the USDM, while the rest are stuck competing for the international scraps - markets Micron is also allowed to compete in, if they wanted to.

GeekyBear• 23 days ago

Oddly enough, Samsung and SK Hynix decided that they needed to expand production on the same day another lawsuit accused them of colluding to keep production low and prices high.

South Korea announces $520bn chip plant project with Samsung, SK Hynix

https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/semiconductors/south-k...

PunchyHamster2• 23 days ago

The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.

No? Cost to produce won't be cheaper just because you have 5 fabs instead of 4. Economies of scale at some level just flatten out so company that chooses to not expand will just enjoy the same level of profit instead of increase

Danox7• 23 days ago

Then Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Kia would go bye-bye in the United States. I think the current memory fiasco will be their last big payday, so they should enjoy it while they can. There will be many companies that will rethink how they approach memory going into the future.

craigjb• 23 days ago

Applied Materials, Lam Research, and KLA are all U.S. companies. ASML supplies lithography, but hundreds of other tools come from these companies.

Catloafdev• 23 days ago

I don't see how this can really go anywhere, but it'd be nice if it does.

Not like it'd be the first time someone shook a stick at them.

At this point the only hope for change is if China finally decides to get in the game rather than just threatening to.

prirun• 23 days ago

And our illustrious leader doesn't tariff Chinese RAM and allows its sale in the US.

Danox7• 23 days ago

The Chinese will get into the game, all right worldwide where most other places aren’t going to care about anything other than the price.

russli19935• 23 days ago

Maybe software people can get around this issue by not making every app a electron bloat? This is now more than doable now you got AI right? And it will save your job

dheera2• 23 days ago

And replace all your apps with some horrible Tcl/Tk and .NET interface?

Nobody ever made good native widgets.

foresto2• 23 days ago

Qt Widgets are good.

the_solenoid3• 23 days ago

Honestly, the knock on effects of this cartel behavior should concern all countries, and be remediated with expediency.

From consumer electronics to the data-center, the rising real mfg costs and lack of supply is putting huge pressure on pricing, and may just drive anyone who cant negotiate with these suppliers out of business.

Once the dominoes start, I fail to see how things recover in less than 3-5 years, not counting all the businesses wiped out in the meanwhile.

microgpt3• 23 days ago

How do we know it's cartel behavior, not just free market competition?

the_solenoid3• 23 days ago

IMPORTANT CONTEXT TO MY ANSWER: There is no such thing as a free market

There are 3 suppliers in the world that together have ~90% of global DRAM manufacturing capacity. I did not say they definitively were a cartel, but the effect is the same: raising prices together, lack of competition (via market consolidation etc) means there is no viable way to make more capacity in any kind of reasonable time frame, and they all moved most capacity away from consumer products imo to shore up giant deals at locked-in high prices with large buyers.

Now, I find it odd that to this day, there are still only 3 suppliers and ram prices (and SSD prices) have not really followed a reasonable pricing curve save for a few maybe a year pre-thecurrentnonsense, where it was getting closer to what I would have expected [I have not plotted the data for this, I just buy a lot of end-user priced ram and ssds for consumer and businesses, and have noticed the trend of prices staying unusually high compared to other tech]

The current problem is mostly one of there being almost no way to make a new ssd/dram mfg for a bunch of reasons: top of the list is probably IP, then the cost+time. Being in this kind of position on a global scale is probably just immensely satisfying for stakeholders, but my feeling is it is now a global security and financial issue.

My take is: use the force of the state to get them to expand capacity and cap pricing (yes, states of sufficient size can enforce this). If they say "we will take our ball and go home" then invalidate their patents and get to work on domestic backups.

Capitalism will find any way to make more money. It doesnt matter if it harms all the entities that buy their products in the long run - short term gain and "someone will figure it out" will always win the day.

Regan will haunt us till our doom if we dont start enforcing even antitrust.

ndiddy• 23 days ago

Looking forward to getting my $10 settlement 15 years from now like what happened with the DVD drive price fixing lawsuit (paid as a digital Visa gift card code so it can't actually be spent anywhere).

caycep• 23 days ago

I also feel like there should be FTC or other antitrust actions against OpenAI and other hyperscalers, with nvidia being complicit, if they are cornering the market that badly on consumer RAM, SSD and other components, especially if these volume purchases are for projected datacenter that haven't even broken ground (or have been paid for) for many months.

Furthermore, I think there should be a tax on algorithmic inefficiency, in that if a LLM, frontier or not, consumes more than a certain amount of KWH per token, it should be taxed such as to put emphasis on models than can run locally, on a normal PC

w10-1• 23 days ago

dumb peripheral question: memory as a circuit would seems easy to add directly on-chip for a company like Apple. Is that blocked by time-frame, IP, technology, cost?

chris_money202• 23 days ago

My guess is area becomes problematic. Chip becomes bigger, harder to manufacture without defects, costs rise as a result of those defects.

Bonus though, Apple is using "defective" chips in other products now such as the Neo which will help some with costs, but overall, you can't just add memory to the chip because the chip can become very yield sensitive, the process has to be there to produce the yield effectively.

mNovak• 23 days ago

Logic gates and memory bits have very different fabrication processes (mostly because DRAM is optimized for a high density of big capacitors doing the storage).

You can put some memory on the logic wafer (SRAM) but it's area inefficient, which is wasteful on your expensive N2 wafer. So a dedicated DRAM process is vastly cheaper per bit, even at current elevated prices.

jmyeet• 23 days ago

Antitrust and anticompetitive behavior continue to evolve. Back when the Sherman Act was passed, we were talking about backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms. One of the more important ways of recent years is where all or most competitors in a market use the same software that outputs the same value as to what they should charge. This is effective collusion even if it isn't explicit. The goal of such software is to raise prices. You raise prices by effectively or actually colluding with other market participants.

The posterchild for this is RealPage [1]. But you're going to see this pop up in every aspect of life, such as gas prices [2] and meat processing [3].

The whole thing is kind of depressing because this is what "innovation" is now: fancy ways to collude on prices.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

[2] https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/ai-helping-gas-stations-col...

[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-a...

topgrain2• 23 days ago

It used to be possible to bust up a company based (more or less) simply on their having too much of the market.

Right wing interests built up think-tanks after the Second World War, having seen the success of especially the Brookings Institution during the New Deal and world war eras in pushing technocratic-liberalism and wanting to fight fire with fire by creating their own credibility-laundering offices for propaganda advancing the desires of the rich. This effort bore its first great fruit in the mid '70s as Chicago School economists and lobbyists successfully overthrew that enforcement regime and replaced it with one in which specific harm must be proven to win an antitrust case, which de facto ended meaningful anti-trust enforcement in the US and led to the consolidation of money, power, and media over the following decades.

Aaaand... here we are, in the endgame of that movement.

devilfileprong• 23 days ago

Visit Beijing,where Zima is Neria to Grand Mittens.

steveBK1232• 23 days ago

This is probably the one moment in time there really doesn't need to be any price fixing / collusion.

If demand for your product has temporarily spiked so high you can have 80% margins, then its not like your competitor has any reason to price compete.

Particularly in an industry where spinning up new capacity is a multi-year $10s of billions investment.

cccaaai• 22 days ago

Check out how Micron’s Annual Report outlines a different perspective on supply and demand: https://chat.pageindex.ai/share/chat/cmr0fwtyt00000ai1rtdrqv...

Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing

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