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seventeen plaintiffs, three chipmakers, and a class action over whether the AI memory shift was cover for keeping conventional DRAM supply artificially tight

On June 25, 2026, seventeen plaintiffs, fourteen individuals and three small PC-building or distribution businesses, filed a class action against Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case, Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics, was assigned to Judge Noel Wise. It argues that the shift toward AI memory wasn't just a business decision that happened to squeeze consumers, but was used as cover to keep conventional DRAM supply artificially tight.

None of that's proven. Micron has already denied the claims and said it will defend itself in court. But the underlying numbers behind the lawsuit, the market share concentration, the production tradeoffs, the price charts, are not in dispute, and they're worth looking at on their own.

Same three companies, and this isn't the first time

In the early 2000s, Dell and Gateway both noticed DRAM prices behaving oddly and raised it with regulators, which led to a Justice Department investigation. By 2005, Samsung had pleaded guilty and paid $300 million in fines, SK Hynix pleaded guilty and paid $185 million, and several executives across the industry served prison time. The current lawsuit explicitly cites that history as evidence of a pattern, though a prior conviction from two decades ago obviously isn't proof of anything happening now.

Samsung pleaded guilty in 2005, paid $300 million in fines.

SK Hynix pleaded guilty in 2005, paid $185 million.

Several executives across the industry were sentenced to prison time.

The new complaint alleges that Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron used the industry's shift toward High Bandwidth Memory as a pretext for winding down output of older, conventional formats like DDR3 and DDR4, and it points to Apple's recent price increases on Macs and iPads as downstream evidence of the effect. The plaintiffs are seeking treble damages and a court order ending what they call a coordinated production squeeze.

It's worth being precise about what the lawsuit actually has to prove. Nobody disputes that all three companies cut conventional DRAM output around the same period, or that prices spiked as a result. What's genuinely contested is whether that was three companies independently chasing the same profitable HBM opportunity, which isn't illegal on its own, or something closer to coordination. Those look almost identical from the outside, which is exactly why the case exists and why it will likely take discovery, not public market data, to sort out.

A market with no fourth option

As of the first quarter of 2026, Samsung held roughly 38% of global DRAM revenue, SK Hynix around 29%, and Micron about 22%, according to TrendForce, with a handful of smaller Taiwanese suppliers like Nanya and Winbond splitting the rest. That's close to 90% of the industry sitting with three companies.

Global DRAM market share, revenue basis

Source: TrendForce, Q1 2026

In a less concentrated market, a buyer squeezed by one supplier tightening output can usually turn to another. That option barely exists here. When three firms controlling nearly all conventional DRAM revenue shift capacity in the same direction, whether independently or otherwise, there's no fourth supplier large enough to absorb the difference, and the effect shows up across the market at once.

What actually happened to prices

The pricing story here is messier than a single clean trend line, mostly because forecasters kept getting surprised and having to revise upward. TrendForce initially projected conventional DRAM contract prices would rise 55 to 60% quarter over quarter in Q1 2026. By February, it revised that to 90 to 95%. The actual result, reported in June, landed at roughly 93 to 98% quarter over quarter, among the largest single-quarter increases the firm has tracked. That single quarter alone pushed total DRAM industry revenue up 81% to about $97 billion.

The quarter before that told a different story. TrendForce had put Q4 2025 conventional DRAM increases at a comparatively modest 8 to 13% quarter over quarter, rising to 13 to 18% once HBM was factored in. DDR4 specifically had nearly doubled in price the quarter before that, in Q3 2025, according to TrendForce's own commentary at the time. So the increases haven't moved at a steady pace, they've come in uneven, sometimes-modest, sometimes-explosive jumps depending on the product and the quarter, which is part of why the lawsuit's own filing cites a roughly 700% cumulative price increase over the past four years rather than any single tidy percentage.

Conventional DRAM contract price change, quarter over quarter

Source: TrendForce quarterly memory briefings, Sept 2025 – June 2026

The capacity fight underneath the price story

The plaintiffs' filing cites data claiming Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have shifted roughly a quarter of their combined DRAM wafer capacity toward HBM production since 2022. That matters more than it might sound like, because an HBM chip takes up roughly twice the physical wafer area of a standard DDR chip, so converting a line to HBM doesn't just cost one unit of DRAM capacity, it costs closer to two. Total global DRAM wafer capacity is projected to grow about 14% by 2026, but the complaint estimates capacity allocated specifically to conventional DRAM will grow only around 10% of that, with the rest absorbed by HBM.

AI customers pay considerably more per unit than phone or laptop makers do, which is the straightforward financial logic behind that shift, and on its own that's a legal business decision. Whether three competitors converging on the same capacity allocation around the same time was independent or coordinated is, again, the actual legal question here.

Meanwhile, the earnings have been enormous

Whatever the courts eventually decide, the business results are already public record. Micron reported fiscal Q3 2026 revenue of $41.46 billion, up 74% sequentially and 346% year over year, with DRAM revenue alone hitting a record $31.3 billion. The company guided to roughly $50 billion in revenue for the following quarter. Micron's stock is up around 700% over the past year.

SK Hynix posted a full-year 2025 operating profit of 47.2 trillion won, ahead of the 43.6 trillion won Samsung reported for the same period, and briefly overtook Samsung in total market capitalization on June 22, 2026, becoming South Korea's most valuable listed company for the first time, largely on the strength of its roughly 61% share of the global HBM market. Samsung disputed the comparison, noting it excludes the company's preferred shares.

Large buyers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are comparatively insulated from these swings because they negotiate long-term supply agreements. Individual consumers generally don't have that option and pay closer to spot prices, which is part of why memory has grown from roughly 10 to 15% of a device's total manufacturing cost before the shortage to a share TrendForce expects to exceed 20% in 2026. None of that changes regardless of how Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics eventually resolves.

References & Background

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

The RAM Shortage Isn't Just an AI Problem