If you’ve been wincing at memory prices lately, a new courtroom drama might explain why. A class action lawsuit filed on June 25 in the California Northern District Court accuses the three largest memory makers on the planet — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology — of conspiring to keep DRAM scarce and expensive.
The case, formally titled Garciaguirre et al v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al, brings together seventeen plaintiffs, three of them small businesses. Their argument is blunt: the ongoing RAM shortage isn’t an accident of supply chains or surging AI demand — it’s manufactured, in every sense of the word.
According to the filing, the three companies — which between them produce most of the world’s DRAM — have been coordinating on supply and pricing since 2022. The plaintiffs claim that this alleged collusion has driven prices up by roughly 700% over the past four years, an eye-watering figure for anyone who has tried to spec out a PC, a server, or even a modest workstation recently.
The mechanics described are textbook antitrust territory. Rather than openly fixing a price tag, the suit alleges the trio kept production deliberately constrained, letting artificial scarcity do the heavy lifting. When three suppliers control the lion’s share of a market, the argument goes, restraining output is a quieter — and harder to prove — way of pushing prices skyward than a handshake over numbers.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the memory industry’s first brush with these accusations. The same three names have faced collusion claims before, and DRAM pricing has long been a magnet for regulatory scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions. That history gives the new complaint a familiar shape, even if its specific allegations still have to be tested in court.
For now, the legal weight rests on what the plaintiffs can demonstrate. Class actions of this kind are notoriously difficult to win: proving coordinated behaviour, as opposed to three rational companies independently reacting to the same market signals, is the central battleground. AI infrastructure spending has genuinely vacuumed up vast quantities of high-end memory, and the defendants will almost certainly point to that demand as the real driver.
What makes this case interesting for the rest of us is timing. The complaint was filed just days ago, and the shortage it describes is very much live — affecting everything from gaming rigs to enterprise servers. Whether the courts ultimately find collusion or simply a tight market behaving badly, the lawsuit puts a spotlight on an uncomfortable reality: a handful of firms control the memory that powers nearly every device you own.
The outcome won’t lower your next RAM purchase overnight. But if the plaintiffs prevail, it could reshape how one of tech’s most concentrated markets is allowed to operate.
