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Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing
- tommy_axle 4mo agoIt wouldn't be a first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- xxs 4mo agoI thought the title missed the year (in parenthesis)
- theandrewbailey 4mo agoIt's been happening once every decade or so. I'm not surprised that they are being sued again.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- adiabatichottub 4mo ago[dead]
- jauntywundrkind 4mo agoTotal fines of about half a billion. Thats not nothing but it also does not seem like a real disincentive. Samsung is about to hand out ~$26B in bonuses. SK Hynix something similar-ish.
- tyre 4mo agoYes, but for context Samsung is a massive chaebol. You need to compare it to the business unit in question. It’s different to, say, Google’s vertical monopoly in advertising where that’s most of their revenue.
- stymaar 4mo agoThis! Samsung is one of the world's biggest ship maker for instance.
- SideQuark 4mo agoTrue. From that page RAM companies have been sued and found innocent before: “ The district court ruled in favor of Samsung, Hynix, and Micron and dismissed the lawsuit. This dismissal was affirmed on appeal by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in March 2022 that the plaintiffs did not offer sufficient plausible evidence for their allegations to make a case under the Sherman Antitrust Act and that the district court properly dismissed the lawsuit.”
- 0xy 4mo agoI think it's incredibly unlikely to be deliberate price fixing this time. Demand is too high.
- Citizen_Lame 4mo ago[flagged]
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoTwo things can be true; they could theoretically make agreements to limit supply, like the OPEC does to exert control over international oil prices. But the OPEC is all above board and there's plenty of international competition on the oil market. But the challenge is in proving it.
- ksec 4mo agoIt isn't like OPEC and oil where you can turn on and off bumping out from the ground. The most expensive foundry / fab isn't the leading edge, it is the "empty" ones. You can't have a fab sitting idle.
- mDyJzDPmBdG 4mo agoThere is no reason for there not to be a price fixing. But the OpenAI's announcement from 2025-10-01 about buying 40% of supply, removes any need for collusion. It was a public signal for everyone to rise prices, one that each company could figure on their own. And it will be very hard to prove otherwise.
- jackb4040 4mo agoPrices skyrocketing create a perfect opportunity to slip in a little artificial bump and hope everyone blames the market. See also: egg prices in 2024.
- russli1993 4mo agoif demand is too high, the market will adjust by adding supply. If Apple can't take the price of memory, why don't they make memory themselves. Oh no, the technical and manufacturing know-how is a barrier to entry and there is no talent available to make it. That is memory or semi companies' competitive advantages and their pricing power. It also takes Phd degrees to work at hardware companies. You can't have people doing leetcode for 2 months and todo apps and getting into the field and make 300k a year and hardware engineers wih Phds making 100k before this boom. It is long overdue for a rebalance of pricing power between hardware and software companies
- cbg0 4mo agoThis was attempted before in 2022 but fell apart because plaintiff couldn't show an agreement took place https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2022/03/07/21-15125.pdf https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2022/03/07/2...
- mywittyname 4mo agoThe arguments made by the Plaintiff are thoroughly convincing to me. The fact that those 8 points are not enough to convict indicate the industry is fucked. Of course the defendants didn't leave a paper trail - they've already been convicted of collusion before. It's the people and country that suffer when our government fails to ensure markets are free and fair.
- Stitch4223 4mo agoIf there is no agreement, then the magic term is "tacit collusion." Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. If suppliers have sufficiently different products, they can make some more expensive, others cheaper; on average, everybody pays more. A high barrier to entry might help such practices. That doesn't mean I'm saying this is what is happening. Sometimes things just suck, and somebody bought the world's supply of RAM wafers to use as frisbees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion
- mywittyname 4mo agoWe have to decide what part is damaging to society: the actual physical agreement, or the effects of the agreement? If it's the actual physical agreement that's the problem - the system is working as intended. But if we are looking to prevent the negative outcomes associated with price fixing and collusion, our system is failing us. They are never going to find proof of conspiracy. The people involved covered their tracks, and doing so is trivial. So the best we can do is punish the appearance of collusion. And if the goal is to actually prevent harm to customers, that's a better solution anyway, since it encourages leaders of companies to behave in a manner that's the opposite of collusion.
- xiphias2 4mo ago,,The plaintiffs claimed the three companies reduced D-RAM supply under the pretext of transitioning to high-bandwidth memory (HBM). "The D-RAM oligopoly companies systematically coordinated the shift to HBM and the discontinuation of DDR3 and DDR4," they said. They added that Apple's recent sweeping product price increases were the trigger for the lawsuit.'' How can they do price fixing and discontinuing a product at the same time? It just looks like some companies are angry that AI / VC industry is outpricing them.
- sysguest 4mo agohmm maybe the plaintiff should sue nvidia?
- dcrazy 4mo ago> An agreement to restrict production, sales, or output is just as illegal as direct price fixing, because reducing the supply of a product or service drives up its price. For example, the FTC challenged an agreement among competing oil importers to restrict the supply of lubricants by refusing to import or sell those products in Puerto Rico. The competitors were seeking to pressure the legislature to repeal an environmental deposit fee on lubricants, and warned of lubricant shortages and higher prices. https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/dealings-competitors/price-fixing https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
- Danox 4mo agoPeople have a tendency to get upset when someone waves a future IOU intent order from another buyer in front of you, one that isn’t taking delivery anytime soon and then proceeds to tell you you must pay more…
- glimshe 4mo agoEverybody in our industry loves fat margins. But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.
- gruez 4mo ago>But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits. Yeah that's how law works. Everyone likes money, but that doesn't mean it's fine to steal money. Yes, even from maligned entities like "big tech" or "private equity"
- lenerdenator 4mo agoThere's "fat margins" and then there's the kind of margins that tech industry shareholders expect. OpenAI's original corporate agreements capped its returns at 100x, which is seen as too paltry for its current holders, so they scrapped those to prepare for an IPO [0] That is, in a word, insane. [0] https://abhs.in/blog/openai-for-profit-conversion-ipo-developer-impact-sam-altman-equity-2026 https://abhs.in/blog/openai-for-profit-conversion-ipo-develo...
- Danox 4mo agoA fat margin is fine. What’s not fine is saying you don’t have any and you don’t plan to make any more.
- Neywiny 4mo agoHBM is also DRAM. I also think it's kind of a weak argument to say that them discontinuing ddr3 (which while in use still today in industrial/embedded was on the way out for consumers 10 years ago) and ddr4 which last had consumer CPUs for it 3 years ago is meaningful. What we need now is ddr5. Turning off the old fabs and moving those resources including people to ddr5 is a good thing. That's not price fixing. It's possible price fixing is in play, but discontinuing products people objectively don't use as much anymore isn't it.
- cosmic_cheese 4mo agoSwitching off DDR3 manufacturing I can understand, but DDR4 machines are still quite relevant and usable… Ryzen 5000 series boxes for example don’t feel meaningfully weaker than they did when new. My 5950X tower certainly doesn’t, and it’d really be nice to be able to upgrade its RAM should I need to because it will continue to be useful for quite some time. AMD just re-released their 5800X3D for AM4 board users who wish to upgrade which is further evidence that shutting off DDR4 production is premature.
- zarzavat 4mo agoThey're running a business not a charity. Their job is to manufacture what the market as a whole demands. If they can make more money making HBM than DDR4 then they have to make HBM. Why would a business go out of its way to make less money?
- cosmic_cheese 4mo ago1. The AI bubble is an insane distortion and the gravy train isn’t going to last forever. Betting the farm on everlasting datacenter demand is myopic. 2. In a healthy, competitive market there would be smaller manufacturers that’d be happy to take up the big guys’ discarded business.
- iwontberude 4mo agoDeleted
- WarmWash 4mo agoJust a reminder that anyone can file a lawsuit over anything, and the initial complaint is written by lawyers and reads with tabloid levels of sensationalism and allegation. The goal being to maximize the appearance of harm as much as possible so the suit has the greatest chance of sticking. It is not in any way, shape, or form a ruling much less even a piece of well researched work. It's "my side of the story that makes me look perfect, with lawyers turning the heat up to 11"
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoHonestly a lot of lawsuits feel like they just want the other party to pay them (settle) to make the lawsuit go away, even if there is no case; what are the repercussions for a frivolous lawsuit?
- vablings 4mo agoRealistically very few. The plaintiff carries the burden of proving the claim, but they are afforded the power of the law to do so via discovery. The defendant then has to spend a large number of legal resources refusing the claims and also providing the evidence required. If the plaintiff loses the lawsuit a countersuit is pretty unlikely to succeed unless the lawyer participates in gross misconduct. Generally, countersuits are filed more to put the original plaintiff on the defense and don't result in a large judgement. If you are operating in good faith, then you are pretty insular from kickback as a plaintiff
- lotsofpulp 4mo ago>what are the repercussions for a frivolous lawsuit? None, hence the high price of liability baked into basically everything in America. And not just in nominal prices, but in terms of things like restricting access to spaces, restricting access to information, etc.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoIn reality a lawsuit needs to have some basis. The bar might be low but judges frown on having their time wasted with a truly frivolous claim or a claim with no clear damages or harm shown.
- cute_boi 4mo agoI think the only solution to this issue is China. If CXMT can supply, it will put all these monopolies in check.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Arubis 4mo agoThat’s a nice short-term solution. How do you envision adding an infinitely-deep-pocketed state-sponsored supplier to the mix over the longer term?
- jackb4040 4mo agoWhat would the issue be, in the long term? I'm struggling to see a downside to more manufacturing capacity
- Arubis 4mo agoIf you want to realistically compete in a market with state-backed firms, you need state backing. Aerospace is a prime example.
- jackb4040 4mo agoOh, maybe we're mixing terms here. OP was proposing CXMT as a "solution" to the problem of these companies engaging in price fixing. Now you're saying there needs to be a "solution" to the problem of these companies no longer being able to "compete" (engage in price fixing), because CXMT exists. The latter is not a problem I or almost anybody outside those companies care to fix. It's not the public's job to bail out a company because they forced states to intervene to break up their monopoly after taking the highest profits in the industry's history.
- dabinat 4mo agoEven if CXMT can only sell in China, that reduces the amount of memory China needs to buy from other manufacturers, thus benefiting everyone.
- varispeed 4mo agoPrice fixing is legal as long as your are doing it in the open. In the UK it is called "price match" and eg. if supermarket says they keep prices matched to their competitor. No regulator raises an eyebrow. So here Samsung and SK Hynix could say they price match to Micron and they are in the clear.
- vablings 4mo agoThat is not what price fixing actually is. In the UK "price matching" is a one-to-many relationship meaning that the price of goods is set to the "lowest available" Price fixing is a many-to-one all the manufactures agree to the highest prices they all agree on and set it there.
- varispeed 4mo agoYou are arguing semantics. Effect is the same.
- vablings 3mo agoThe effect is literally the opposite of what was described. It provides a downward pressure on pricing and it's all open. If you think a private agreement to fix the price at an artificially inflated level is the same as a public offer to lower the price based on competitors, I have little hope for any business venture you may partake/undertake
- tribal808 4mo agoeverything is political
- mattfrommars 4mo agoAnyone know what will lawfirms cut if they win from the lawsuit? How many millions are we talking.
- bilekas 4mo agoI mean there was an attempt before, and maybe I'm wrong but I'm sure they were fined in 2010 at least in the EU, 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. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_586 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...
- gruez 4mo ago>keep supply as low as they want and allow the AI companies to spend hand over fist That's indistinguishable from not wanting to get burned by another semiconductor boom/bust cycle.
- bilekas 4mo agoI think they already know it's gonna take China a year or two to ramp up, so they're banking on that ?
- mrtksn 4mo agoWhat happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction? They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.
- ksec 4mo ago>It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling. Depends if US can demand ASML which uses plenty of US tech inside. In reality even the DRAM and NAND supply chain has plenty of US technologies. And you say Micron are US but they have lots of Fabs in Japan as well since they acquired Elpida.
- mrtksn 4mo agoEveryone is using something from someone, you can even argue that US owes India and Europe huge compensation because pretty much everything US did in the last half century was made using technology or people funded by those people. Johny Ive is British, Almost all the AI stuff is created by Europeans, Israelis, and Canadians - thus funded by their respective taxpayers. The thing about the US losing its grip on the world and the collapse of the global world order means that the words on the paper don't mean much. Embargoes on Russia didn't mean much so Europeans are physically taking over their ships and Ukrainians are physically sinking the rest of their ships. In Iran nothing other than physically sinking ships and blowing up places meant anything. Europeans can ship EUV machines because they are physically building them for people who will use these to physically build the most valuable products currently there is. US wasn't able to enforce its will to Iran, what if Koreans, Europeans and the Chinese decide that its not into their interest to act according to US courts?
- ksec 4mo agoIf history is any guidelines that would be how World War III starts. There is nothing that stops US from building their own Memory Fabs, or asking / funding Micron building more US Fabs. It will cost a more, but the complexity is certainly no where near replicating TSMC.
- yahavthehackern 4mo ago[flagged]
- Catloafdev 4mo agoI don't see how this can really go anywhere, but it'd be nice if it does. Not like it'd be the first time someone shook a stick at them. At this point the only hope for change is if China finally decides to get in the game rather than just threatening to.
- russli1993 4mo agoMaybe software people can get around this issue by not making every app a electron bloat? This is now more than doable now you got AI right? And it will save your job
- dheera 4mo agoAnd replace all your apps with some horrible Tcl/Tk and .NET interface? Nobody ever made good native widgets.
- foresto 4mo agoQt Widgets are good.
- dheera 4mo agoNo, they suck. No swiping, no pull-to-refresh, no multitouch zoom, the calendars dropdowns are horrible to use, the buttons look like something out of Windows 3.1
- foresto 4mo agoThose are touchscreen actions, uncommon in desktop apps. Did you forget that this thread is about avoiding Electron bloat? (Also, it has a theme engine. The buttons don't look like something out of Windows 3.1 unless you use a Windows 3.1 theme.)
- science4sail 3mo agoThis seems to be an implication of the current market. Since most humans (and thus most consumers) use a phone or tablet as a primary computing device, it's unthinkable to make a consumer software UI that isn't mobile-first or touchscreen-focused.
- PunchyHamster 4mo agoI want none of those features in my desktop app
- the_solenoid 4mo agoHonestly, the knock on effects of this cartel behavior should concern all countries, and be remediated with expediency. From consumer electronics to the data-center, the rising real mfg costs and lack of supply is putting huge pressure on pricing, and may just drive anyone who cant negotiate with these suppliers out of business. Once the dominoes start, I fail to see how things recover in less than 3-5 years, not counting all the businesses wiped out in the meanwhile.
- microgpt 4mo agoHow do we know it's cartel behavior, not just free market competition?
- the_solenoid 4mo agoIMPORTANT CONTEXT TO MY ANSWER: There is no such thing as a free market There are 3 suppliers in the world that together have ~90% of global DRAM manufacturing capacity. I did not say they definitively were a cartel, but the effect is the same: raising prices together, lack of competition (via market consolidation etc) means there is no viable way to make more capacity in any kind of reasonable time frame, and they all moved most capacity away from consumer products imo to shore up giant deals at locked-in high prices with large buyers. Now, I find it odd that to this day, there are still only 3 suppliers and ram prices (and SSD prices) have not really followed a reasonable pricing curve save for a few maybe a year pre-thecurrentnonsense, where it was getting closer to what I would have expected [I have not plotted the data for this, I just buy a lot of end-user priced ram and ssds for consumer and businesses, and have noticed the trend of prices staying unusually high compared to other tech] The current problem is mostly one of there being almost no way to make a new ssd/dram mfg for a bunch of reasons: top of the list is probably IP, then the cost+time. Being in this kind of position on a global scale is probably just immensely satisfying for stakeholders, but my feeling is it is now a global security and financial issue. My take is: use the force of the state to get them to expand capacity and cap pricing (yes, states of sufficient size can enforce this). If they say "we will take our ball and go home" then invalidate their patents and get to work on domestic backups. Capitalism will find any way to make more money. It doesnt matter if it harms all the entities that buy their products in the long run - short term gain and "someone will figure it out" will always win the day. Regan will haunt us till our doom if we dont start enforcing even antitrust.
- ndiddy 4mo agoLooking forward to getting my $10 settlement 15 years from now like what happened with the DVD drive price fixing lawsuit (paid as a digital Visa gift card code so it can't actually be spent anywhere).
- caycep 4mo agoI also feel like there should be FTC or other antitrust actions against OpenAI and other hyperscalers, with nvidia being complicit, if they are cornering the market that badly on consumer RAM, SSD and other components, especially if these volume purchases are for projected datacenter that haven't even broken ground (or have been paid for) for many months. Furthermore, I think there should be a tax on algorithmic inefficiency, in that if a LLM, frontier or not, consumes more than a certain amount of KWH per token, it should be taxed such as to put emphasis on models than can run locally, on a normal PC
- w10-1 4mo agodumb peripheral question: memory as a circuit would seems easy to add directly on-chip for a company like Apple. Is that blocked by time-frame, IP, technology, cost?
- chris_money202 4mo agoMy guess is area becomes problematic. Chip becomes bigger, harder to manufacture without defects, costs rise as a result of those defects. Bonus though, Apple is using "defective" chips in other products now such as the Neo which will help some with costs, but overall, you can't just add memory to the chip because the chip can become very yield sensitive, the process has to be there to produce the yield effectively.
- mNovak 4mo agoLogic gates and memory bits have very different fabrication processes (mostly because DRAM is optimized for a high density of big capacitors doing the storage). You can put some memory on the logic wafer (SRAM) but it's area inefficient, which is wasteful on your expensive N2 wafer. So a dedicated DRAM process is vastly cheaper per bit, even at current elevated prices.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jmyeet 4mo agoAntitrust and anticompetitive behavior continue to evolve. Back when the Sherman Act was passed, we were talking about backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms. One of the more important ways of recent years is where all or most competitors in a market use the same software that outputs the same value as to what they should charge. This is effective collusion even if it isn't explicit. The goal of such software is to raise prices. You raise prices by effectively or actually colluding with other market participants. The posterchild for this is RealPage [1]. But you're going to see this pop up in every aspect of life, such as gas prices [2] and meat processing [3]. The whole thing is kind of depressing because this is what "innovation" is now: fancy ways to collude on prices. [1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-realpage-algorithmic-pricing-scheme-harms-millions-american-renters https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s... [2]: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/ai-helping-gas-stations-collude-raise-california-fuel-134182086 https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/ai-helping-gas-stations-col... [3]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-agri-stats-end-exchange-competitively-sensitive-information https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-a...
- topgrain2 4mo agoIt used to be possible to bust up a company based (more or less) simply on their having too much of the market. Right wing interests built up think-tanks after the Second World War, having seen the success of especially the Brookings Institution during the New Deal and world war eras in pushing technocratic-liberalism and wanting to fight fire with fire by creating their own credibility-laundering offices for propaganda advancing the desires of the rich. This effort bore its first great fruit in the mid '70s as Chicago School economists and lobbyists successfully overthrew that enforcement regime and replaced it with one in which specific harm must be proven to win an antitrust case, which de facto ended meaningful anti-trust enforcement in the US and led to the consolidation of money, power, and media over the following decades. Aaaand... here we are, in the endgame of that movement.
- fratefritto 4mo ago[flagged]
- devilfileprong 4mo agoVisit Beijing,where Zima is Neria to Grand Mittens.
- steveBK123 4mo agoThis 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. Particularly in an industry where spinning up new capacity is a multi-year $10s of billions investment.
- iamkrazy 4mo ago[dead]
- cccaaai 3mo agoCheck out how Micron’s Annual Report outlines a different perspective on supply and demand: https://chat.pageindex.ai/share/chat/cmr0fwtyt00000ai1rtdrqv9q https://chat.pageindex.ai/share/chat/cmr0fwtyt00000ai1rtdrqv...