Newshot Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron's Motion to Dismiss Rejected by US Court in Alleged Artificial DRAM Shortage Case
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Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron's Motion to Dismiss Rejected by US Court in Alleged Artificial DRAM Shortage Case
IT之家 November 15 news, according to legal media outlet LitNews, in a ruling issued on November 14 local time, Judge Noelle Wise (Noël Wise) of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California fully denied the joint motion to dismiss filed by Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix, ruling that the plaintiffs' complaint made plausible allegations that the three parties violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by entering into an illegal agreement.
IT之家 note: The judge has only denied the defendants' Motion to Dismiss, finding that the plaintiffs' allegations are "plausible" on their face, and has allowed the case to proceed to the next stage (discovery and substantive proceedings). No final substantive judgment has yet been made on whether the three companies have committed violations or must bear liability for damages.
The lawsuit was jointly filed on June 25, 2026, by 17 consumers and small businesses from five US states; according to the complaint, these consumers allege that Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron artificially limited DRAM supply to create a market shortage, thereby sharply driving up memory prices and harming consumer interests.
The complaint states that as of the third quarter of 2025, these three DRAM giants together accounted for more than 91% of global DRAM market revenue share.
Although the defendants argued that their prudent capacity adjustments were a natural response to surging artificial intelligence demand and were identical to a previously dismissed lawsuit from 2018, Judge Wise disagreed, stating bluntly: "The Court finds that this is not the case."
In response to the three companies' defense that "in a highly concentrated market, competitors naturally pay close attention to each other's movements," she wrote in the ruling: "However, the plaintiffs' allegations go far beyond the scope of 'eagles watching each other'; their claims are more akin to 'eagles flying in formation'— and this is by no means normal behavior for eagles in their natural state."
The complaint shows that the three manufacturers began cutting conventional memory production in late 2022 and shifted wafer capacity to high bandwidth memory (HBM) in 2023.
Without any of the three companies expanding total output, this shift in capacity allocation drove conventional DRAM prices up by an astonishing 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 the silicon wafer area of standard DDR5 memory, this move severely squeezed memory supply for the consumer and personal computer markets, casting a dark cloud over the entire industry and causing widespread suffering.
In her ruling, Judge Wise noted that the three parties did indeed take multiple coordinated actions beyond normal market patterns, and that without a prior tacit understanding, these measures would have been extremely difficult to reverse.
Specifically, Samsung and SK hynix refused to sign long-term agreements with major purchasers of conventional DRAM, while also delaying or halting plans to build new DRAM wafer fabs. In addition, the three companies successively reduced and shut down DDR4 production lines within the same quarter of 2025, and Micron announced on December 3, 2025, the shutdown of its consumer storage brand Crucial, which had nearly 30 years of history.
The court also noted that Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron adopted identical customer review mechanisms in January 2026, and that the three had a prior record of price manipulation between 1998 and 2002.
Based on the above facts, Judge Wise has ordered the three DRAM manufacturers to submit formal answers to the complaint by December 7, 2026, and has set the first case management conference for January 12, 2027.
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