Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 15 that, according to legal news outlet LitNews, in a ruling issued on November 14 local time, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California denied in full a joint motion to dismiss filed by Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix. She ruled that the plaintiffs’ complaint plausibly alleged that the three companies had reached an unlawful agreement in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act.
IT Home notes that the judge has only denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss, finding that the plaintiffs’ allegations are facially plausible and allowing the case to proceed to the next stage, discovery and consideration of the merits. She has not yet issued a final judgment finding that the three companies broke the law or owe damages.
The lawsuit was jointly filed on June 25, 2026, by 17 consumers and small businesses from 5 U.S. states. According to the complaint, these consumers believe Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron artificially restricted DRAM supply, creating a market shortage that sharply drove up memory prices and harmed consumers.
The complaint states that, as of the third quarter of 2025, the three DRAM giants together accounted for more than 91% of global DRAM market revenue.
The defendants argued that their cautious capacity adjustments were a natural response to surging demand for artificial intelligence and that the case was just like an earlier lawsuit from 2018 that had been dismissed. Judge Wise disagreed, stating: “The Court thinks otherwise.”
Addressing the three companies’ defense that “in a highly concentrated market, competitors naturally watch each other closely,” she wrote in the ruling: “The plaintiffs’ allegations, however, go far beyond ‘hawks watching one another’; their claims are more like ‘hawks flying in formation’—and that is hardly normal behavior for hawks in the wild.”
According to the complaint, the three manufacturers began cutting production of conventional memory in late 2022 and shifted wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in 2023.
With none of the three companies increasing total output, this shift in capacity allocation drove conventional DRAM prices up by a staggering 697% in just 18 months, from the end of the third quarter of 2024 to the end of the first quarter of 2026. Because each GB of HBM requires three to four times as much silicon wafer area as standard DDR5 memory, the move severely squeezed memory supply for the consumer and PC markets, leaving the entire industry under a cloud and struggling.
Judge Wise noted in her ruling that the three parties had taken several coordinated actions beyond normal market behavior and that these steps would be extremely difficult to reverse without a prior understanding among them.
Specifically, Samsung and SK Hynix refused to sign long-term agreements with major buyers of conventional DRAM, while delaying or halting plans for new DRAM wafer fabs. In addition, all three companies successively reduced and shut down DDR4 production lines within the same quarter of 2025. Micron also announced on December 3, 2025, that it would shut down Crucial, its nearly 30-year-old consumer storage brand.
The court also noted that Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron adopted virtually identical customer review procedures in January 2026 and that the three had previously engaged in price fixing between 1998 and 2002.
On the basis of these facts, Judge Wise has ordered the three DRAM manufacturers to file formal responses to the complaint by December 7, 2026, and scheduled the first case management conference for January 12, 2027.