US court lets DRAM price-fixing class action against Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron proceed

A federal judge in California has refused to dismiss a proposed class action accusing the three companies that dominate global DRAM — Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — of conspiring to restrict the supply of conventional memory chips, allowing the case to move forward.

What the court decided

On Nov. 14, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California denied the companies' joint motion to dismiss, finding that the complaint plausibly alleges an illegal agreement under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, according to LitNews. The ruling is a pleading-stage judgment: the allegations are accepted as true for now and remain unproven.

The suit was filed on June 25, 2026 by 17 consumers and small businesses from five states, and pairs the federal claim with claims under California, Florida, Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin law that the parties agreed rise and fall with it.

The allegations

According to the complaint, the three companies controlled more than 91% of global DRAM revenue as of the third quarter of 2025 and began cutting production in late 2022. They then steered capacity toward high bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM used in AI accelerators, and between April and June 2025 each announced it would wind down mainstream DDR4 output. Conventional DRAM prices climbed 697% over 18 months, plaintiffs say, while none of the three meaningfully expanded conventional capacity.

Why this case survived

The companies' central argument was that the suit merely recycled DRAM II, the Ninth Circuit's 2022 decision upholding dismissal of conspiracy claims against the same defendants over a 2016–2018 supply restriction. Judge Wise concluded it does not.

With no direct evidence of a deal, plaintiffs had to show plus factors — facts suggesting coordination rather than conscious parallelism, the lawful pattern of rivals in a concentrated market independently acting alike. The judge found several.

All three manufacturers signed long-term contracts locking up their HBM supply, while Samsung and SK Hynix reportedly refused long-term agreements with major conventional DRAM customers. Micron, for its part, announced on Dec. 3, 2025 that it would close Crucial, the consumer brand it had operated for 30 years. Judge Wise wrote that these moves, together with the failure to expand despite record prices, are the kind no reasonable firm would make without a prior agreement.

She treated fab decisions similarly: citing a 1990 Ninth Circuit petroleum ruling that changes in refinery capacity are not readily reversible, she reasoned that commitments to build or not build chip plants are analogous, making parallel delays probative.

The DDR4 withdrawal also drew scrutiny. The companies said they exited on different timelines, but the complaint alleges all three decided within the same quarter while DDR4 remained in wide use — and, apart from invoking Chinese competition (a point the judge noted appears nowhere in the complaint), they offered no rationale for what she called their sudden, rapid and coordinated exit.

Perhaps most striking, in January 2026 all three allegedly began posing near-identical vetting questions to customers. Judge Wise found this strongly supports an inference of conspiracy, rejected the explanation of booming AI demand (the vetting began years after the AI buildout), and held that plaintiffs need not show the firms exchanged information, since direct evidence is not the standard.

Even timing gaps did not help the defense: SK Hynix and Micron announced cuts three weeks apart in late 2022, and Samsung followed roughly four and a half months later, on April 7, 2023 — a delay she found too short to defeat the parallel-conduct allegation at this stage.

What the court rejected

The ruling was not a clean sweep. Judge Wise set aside the DDR3 allegations because Micron kept producing that memory, agreed that the HBM pivot alone proves nothing since the complaint itself says HBM was more profitable, gave no weight to investor statements or industry-conference meetings, and called the market's oligopolistic structure neutral. She did let plaintiffs lean on the 1998–2002 criminal DRAM cartel, which cost Samsung a $300 million fine and Hynix $185 million while Micron earned immunity as a cooperating whistleblower, despite its age.

At argument the companies invoked the late Judge Posner's observation that competitors in concentrated markets watch each other like hawks. Wise's rejoinder, in her order: the plaintiffs allege hawks "flying in formation" — an activity hawks ordinarily do not do.

What happens next

The companies must answer the complaint by Dec. 7, 2026, and the initial case management conference is set for Jan. 12, 2027, according to LitNews. Plaintiffs are represented by Bathaee Dunne, Samsung by O'Melveny & Myers, SK Hynix by Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, and Micron by Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Why it matters

DRAM sits inside phones, PCs, servers and data centers, and the suit's core claim — that suppliers deliberately starved conventional memory while chasing lucrative AI-focused HBM contracts — maps directly onto the price spikes and allocation tightness hardware buyers have experienced. If the case reaches discovery, internal documents on capacity decisions, HBM commitments and the DDR4 exit could surface. Clearing the exact hurdle that killed DRAM II proves nothing, and class certification and trial remain steep climbs. But for three firms controlling more than nine-tenths of the market, it turns a lingering suspicion into years of litigation risk — and a potential check on how far coordinated market discipline can go when memory is scarce.