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This was attempted before in 2022 but fell apart because plaintiff couldn't show an agreement took place https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2022/03/07/2...
The 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.

It wouldn't be a first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
It's been happening once every decade or so. I'm not surprised that they are being sued again.
True. 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.”

I thought the title missed the year (in parenthesis)
Total 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.

HBM 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.
Switching 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.

Dropping DDR-4 is anything but meaningful. It'll easily last 10 more years, machines from this gen are still much more affordable and quite powerful. In fact for most dev and gaming workflows the difference between the DDR-4 and DDR-5 generation of hardware is more or less negligible. I am exaggerating a bit -- but really, not too much.

Of course it might be a ploy to sheep-herd consumers and companies towards the expensive DDR-5. I would not put that below the ring of RAM producers.

> objectively don't use as much anymore

Consumers use these every single day in embedded devices without knowing it.

I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the embedded DDR3/DDR4 market greatly exceeds the number of consumer desktop computing devices in terms of "devices with memory" (not in sheer IC count or nominal size though.)

The level of design effort and PCB expense to go from DDR3 to DDR5 is enormous.

I was hoping it was a typo, and they actually meant 4 and 5... I didn't even know people made products that still use ddr3.
Embedded devices absolutely need DDR3 and DDR4
It's easy to see why your argument is wrong with a simple hypothetical: what if they were still making DDR4 today? Would people still buy it?

The answer is an obvious "fuck yeah", even if you ignore the DDR5 price gouging. People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware, and that hardware is still extremely relevant.

So if there's a market for it, but none of the suppliers are trying to sell to it... Wtf is happening? Basic capitalism logic says any rational supplier would sell DDR4 for easy profits, meeting an unmet demand. That it isn't happen points to some kind of collusion, IMO.

Antitrust 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-s...

[2]: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/ai-helping-gas-stations-col...

[3]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-a...

It 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.

Maybe 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
And replace all your apps with some horrible Tcl/Tk and .NET interface?

Nobody ever made good native widgets.

Everybody in our industry loves fat margins. But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.
There'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-develo...

A fat margin is fine. What’s not fine is saying you don’t have any and you don’t plan to make any more.
>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"

What 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.

Micron is forced to stop under-investing in plants and will increase production. This will trigger everyone else to expand production and lower prices.

The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.

If Samsung and SK lose access to the US market, they'd be fucked long term. Micron would kill them selling at higher margins and higher volumes in the USDM, while the rest are stuck competing for the international scraps - markets Micron is also allowed to compete in, if they wanted to.

>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.

Then Samsung, Hyundai, LG, Kia would go bye-bye in the United States. I think the current memory fiasco will be their last big payday, so they should enjoy it while they can. There will be many companies that will rethink how they approach memory going into the future.
> What 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 would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?

US is the vast majority of their market - Apple, hyper-scalers, AI labs
I 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

Anyone know what will lawfirms cut if they win from the lawsuit?

How many millions are we talking.

This 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.

Honestly, 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.

Check out how Micron’s Annual Report outlines a different perspective on supply and demand: https://chat.pageindex.ai/share/chat/cmr0fwtyt00000ai1rtdrqv...
I think the only solution to this issue is China. If CXMT can supply, it will put all these monopolies in check.
I 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.

Just 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"

Looking 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).
,,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.

I think it's incredibly unlikely to be deliberate price fixing this time. Demand is too high.
I 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_...

Price 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.

dumb 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?
everything is political
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