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A massive antitrust lawsuit has just been filed accusing Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron of reviving a secret price-fixing cartel under the guise of the artificial intelligence boom. Filed in a California federal court, the lawsuit alleges the companies have driven conventional DRAM memory prices up by a staggering 700% over the last four years through coordinated market manipulation.The legal mechanics of how these companies manipulate the market—moving from "illegal secret meetings" to modern, "quasi-legal" tactics—rely on a strategy known as algorithmic collusion and conscious parallelism.
The smokescreen: The lawsuit highlights that the companies simultaneously slashed production of standard consumer memory (like DDR3 and DDR4) to force artificial scarcity. By publicly blaming the shift on the high demand for High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI data centers, they gave themselves a seemingly legitimate corporate excuse. The lawsuit claims this defense is a coordinated pretext to lock up supply and send consumer component prices charging upward
Modern cartels rarely use smoke-filled backrooms or paper trails; they use public signaling.The Tactic: One executive speaks on a public investor call, stating: "We believe the memory market is oversupplied, and we are reducing our manufacturing output by 20% to stabilize margins."The Response: Within days, the other two competitors announce identical production cuts, citing the exact same market outlook.Why it avoids jail: Under antitrust law, "conscious parallelism" (simply observing a competitor's public actions and mimicking them) is technically legal if done independently. However, the lawsuit argues the perfect synchronization of these production cuts—including Micron completely killing off its highly profitable consumer brand, Crucial—defies all independent business logic and points to an illegal underlying agreement.
The most shocking allegation in the new filing is that the memory giants have rehired and promoted executives who previously went to federal prison for the massive, illegal DRAM price-fixing cartels of the early 2000s.
Nein, hat doch nix damit zu tun?Nur weil du eine SSD gekauft hast?