A federal class-action complaint lodged on 25 June in the Northern District of California accuses the three companies that control virtually all global DRAM production—Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron—of coordinating output cuts to inflate prices. The same day, Apple raised US list prices on MacBooks and iPads by up to 20%, triggering a 6% single-day share drop and erasing roughly $500bn in market value. The suit, brought by 14 consumers and three small businesses, alleges that the trio deliberately throttled supply of mainstream DDR3 and DDR4 memory while steering capacity toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI data centres, creating what the filing calls a market “crippled by the behaviour of DRAM oligopolists.”

The mechanism is structural. Building a single leading-edge DRAM fab costs tens of billions of dollars and requires decades of accumulated process know-how; US export controls further block Chinese rivals from acquiring current-generation equipment. With no outsider able to expand output when the incumbents restrict it, prices for a 12GB LPDDR5X module have leapt from roughly $39 to $145, according to supply-chain checks by Taipei-based analysts. The complaint notes that in a functioning market, soaring prices would pull in new supply; instead, the three suppliers kept conventional DRAM channels starved. This is not the first cycle: Samsung and Hynix pleaded guilty to DRAM price-fixing in 2005, and Chinese regulators probed the same trio during the 2016–18 spike.

The shock is now cascading beyond the courtroom. Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook described the memory cost surge as “unavoidable,” and the company is lobbying the White House for permission to buy from China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), currently on the Entity List, to manage supply risk rather than to cut costs, analysts in Taipei argue. Microsoft raised Xbox prices by $100–$150, citing memory and storage costs that have more than doubled. Viewed from Washington, Senator Bernie Sanders branded Cook’s price hikes “corporate greed,” while Wall Street analysts largely endorsed the move as necessary to defend margins. In Moscow, retailers say existing inventory will delay the pass-through to Russian consumers by weeks or months, but the direction is clear.

For smaller firms, the squeeze is existential. IDC analysts report that memory suppliers now prioritise only the largest customers, leaving start-ups and mid-sized manufacturers unable to secure parts. A single 8GB DRAM chip that cost Mono Technologies $35 during development now costs $300; the company is weighing a one-third price increase or a 75% memory cut. GoPro has warned of bankruptcy risk, and Sonos shares have fallen 23%. The next factual milestone is the court’s decision on class certification, which could expose the three chipmakers to treble damages, while Apple’s fiscal third-quarter results on 30 July will offer the first hard evidence of how the price increases are affecting demand.