Judge lets DRAM price-fixing suit against Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron proceed over alleged 697% price increase

U.S. District Judge Noel Wise of the Northern District of California denied a joint motion to dismiss by Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron in a proposed indirect-purchaser class action filed June 25 by 17 consumers and small businesses. The complaint alleges the three companies, which held more than 91% of global DRAM revenue in Q3 2025, restricted conventional DRAM supply, shifted capacity to high bandwidth memory and announced wind-downs of DDR4, an older mainstream memory standard, producing a 697% price increase over 18 months. The allegations are unproven.

The court's decision turned on whether the complaint plausibly alleged an agreement under Section 1 of the Sherman Act rather than lawful conscious parallelism. Wise found timing gaps insufficient to defeat parallel conduct: SK Hynix and Micron announced cuts three weeks apart in late 2022, and Samsung's lag of about four and a half months until April 7, 2023, was not too long. She credited allegations of long-term HBM lock-ups, Micron's exit from its Crucial consumer brand, fab delays, the DDR4 exit and near-identical customer vetting.

The case tests whether AI-driven capacity shifts are an antitrust issue. DRAM provides temporary high-speed storage in computers, phones and servers; HBM is stacked DRAM used by AI accelerators. Wise treated market structure as neutral, but found the combination of supply cuts, capacity reallocation and customer vetting enough to survive dismissal. She set aside DDR3 allegations because Micron kept producing DDR3, and found the bare HBM pivot alone insufficient because HBM was more profitable when the shift began. The ruling distinguished the case from DRAM II, the Ninth Circuit's 2022 dismissal of earlier claims over a 2016-2018 supply restriction.

Consumers, PC builders and small businesses are the proposed class constituency because DRAM is embedded in laptops, phones, servers and storage devices. The complaint seeks damages for the alleged 697% increase, though class certification and liability remain unresolved. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron must answer by Dec. 7, 2026, and a case management conference is set for Jan. 12, 2027. The case matters because it tests whether alleged coordinated supply restrictions in a concentrated market can be challenged when memory prices spike.