Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing
A class-action lawsuit has been filed in the United States against Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, accusing the three major memory chipmakers of colluding to artificially inflate prices of DRAM and NAND flash memory products.
Background
- **The lawsuit**: A US class-action (filed in California) accuses Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron of colluding to inflate DRAM and NAND flash memory prices from 2016 onward — the same chips found in PCs, phones, data-center servers, and cars.
- **The three companies** control roughly 95%+ of the global DRAM market (Micron is US-based; Samsung and SK Hynix are South Korean). This hyper-concentrated market has a long history of price-fixing probes: the US fined them for similar conduct in the mid-2000s, and China's antitrust regulator investigated in 2023 for NAND flash.
- **Why it matters**: Memory chips are a huge cost line for Apple, Intel, Dell, and every cloud provider (AWS, Google, Azure). If the allegations hold, millions of consumer electronics and enterprise IT purchases were overcharged for years.
- **Timing**: The suit comes amid rising US-China chip tensions and just after US antitrust enforcers signaled tougher scrutiny of semiconductor markets.