Memory giants sued for price-fixing again. The thread says they don't even need to

The complaint: a cartel hiding inside the HBM transition

A US lawsuit, reported by Seoul Economic Daily, accuses Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron of fixing DRAM prices. The plaintiffs' theory, quoted in the complaint, is that the three reduced supply under the pretext of moving to high-bandwidth memory (HBM):

"The D-RAM oligopoly companies systematically coordinated the shift to HBM and the discontinuation of DDR3 and DDR4."

They name a concrete trigger: Apple's recent sweeping product price increases, which the suit treats as the consumer-facing proof that memory costs were being squeezed upward. The three firms control the overwhelming majority of the world's DRAM, which is what makes an "oligopoly coordinated a transition" argument plausible enough to file.

This is not new ground. The same companies were fined by the EU in 2010 over an earlier memory cartel, and a 2022 US suit fell apart when the plaintiff couldn't show an actual agreement took place; that precedent was surfaced by a reader who linked the Ninth Circuit opinion directly.

The thread: when margins are 80%, collusion is redundant

The most repeated objection isn't that the companies are saints. It's that the alleged motive makes no economic sense right now.

"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." — steveBK123

Several readers attacked the HBM logic on the merits. One pointed out that HBM is itself DRAM, and that retiring DDR3 (long gone from consumer CPUs) to free fabs and people for DDR5 is ordinary capacity management, not a conspiracy.

"Turning off the old fabs and moving those resources including people to ddr5 is a good thing. That's not price fixing." — an engineer who works on memory hardware

Another reader caught the internal contradiction in the complaint itself: you cannot simultaneously fix a product's price and discontinue it. The likelier read, in the thread's telling, is resentment that the AI and VC buildout is simply outbidding everyone else for chips.

Not everyone let the makers off. A high-karma reader argued this looks like a deliberate sequel — the cartel learned from 2010 that it only needs to keep supply low and let AI buyers spend hand over fist:

"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." — bilekas

A practitioner added the modern wrinkle that makes these cases hard: explicit smoke-filled-room deals are obsolete. The newer pattern is competitors all running the same pricing software that nudges everyone to the same number — effective collusion with no meeting, the theory behind the RealPage antitrust case.

Where the thread broadly agreed was on the remedy. Lawsuits drag for years and pay out in symbolic gift cards, as one reader recalled from the DVD-drive settlement. The only real check most see is China: if CXMT can ship competitive DRAM at volume, the oligopoly's pricing power evaporates faster than any court can rule. One sober voice kept that hope in check — the contradiction in the filing doesn't mean the makers are clean, only that this particular complaint reads like lawyers turning the heat to eleven.