In February 2024, Marc Garciaguirre bought a 16-gigabyte memory kit for a laptop upgrade on Amazon for about the price of a nice dinner. Eighteen months later, he was back on the same website, paying nearly four times as much for a comparable part. He is now a named plaintiff in a federal antitrust suit that accuses the three companies that make almost all of the world’s memory chips of doing something the industry has done twice before: agreeing, without ever quite saying so, to make less.
The suit, filed in the Northern District of California on June 25, 2026, against Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology, describes a 697 percent rise in the contract price of ordinary computer memory since late 2024, a shortage severe enough that retailers in Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei have started rationing memory sticks like they were toilet paper in the spring of 2020, and a decision by Micron to shut down Crucial, one of the best-known consumer memory brands in the country, at the exact moment its prices were setting records. The companies say the increases simply reflect a memory market reshaped by artificial intelligence, which has created unprecedented demand for the specialized chips that feed AI accelerators.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.