DRAM Antitrust Suit Gains Weight as Jefferies Sees Only 15-20% of New Fabs by 2028
A federal antitrust lawsuit accusing Samsung, SK hynix and Micron of illegally squeezing DRAM supply is gaining fresh ammunition, as fresh industry forecasts suggest new fab capacity won’t meaningfully ease the memory crunch until 2028 at the earliest — years later than the “relief is coming” messaging chipmakers have been giving customers. For PC gamers and console owners already watching RAM and GPU prices climb, the gap between what’s being built and what’s actually promised is becoming the crux of the legal fight.
The Lawsuit: 700% Price Rises and a Familiar Playbook
Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron were sued on June 25 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where 17 plaintiffs accuse the three memory makers of illegally coordinating to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices that the complaint says have risen roughly 700% over four years, with the case invoking the Sherman Act against companies that together hold around 90% of the global DRAM market. The plaintiffs named in the case include 14 individual consumers and three small PC-building and distribution businesses.
At the heart of the complaint is a straightforward but contested claim: the three companies used a coordinated shift toward high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked DRAM that feeds AI accelerators, as a cover to curtail production of older DDR3 and DDR4 modules. The chipmakers haven’t yet responded formally, and companies are free to pursue more profitable products, with the lawsuit ultimately turning on whether Samsung, SK hynix and Micron coordinated those production decisions or reached the same conclusion independently.
It isn’t the industry’s first brush with this exact allegation. Samsung and Hynix pleaded guilty in the 2000s to participating in a DRAM price-fixing conspiracy investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice, with Samsung agreeing to pay a $300 million criminal fine in 2005 and Hynix agreeing to pay $185 million the same year. The new complaint leans on that history to argue a pattern rather than a coincidence.
Jefferies: Only 15-20% of New Capacity Lands by 2028
The timing question is where things get uncomfortable for the defendants. Investment bank Jefferies, cited in a recent analysis of South Korea’s newly announced fab-building spree, projects that DRAM and NAND prices will climb 40-45% year-over-year in 2027, with meaningful relief arriving only in 2028 when just 15-20% of new fabrication capacity comes online. That’s roughly one-sixth to one-fifth of what’s been promised — a figure that plaintiffs’ lawyers could easily point to as evidence that supply constraints are being managed rather than solved.
Separately, UBS expects the DRAM industry to stay undersupplied until at least the second quarter of 2028, a timeline that lines up with Jefferies’ own caution. Both estimates undercut the idea, floated repeatedly by the chipmakers themselves, that the current shortage is a temporary bottleneck rather than a structural choice about where capacity gets pointed.
Executives Concede the 2028 Squeeze
Even industry insiders are hedging. Kyung Kye-hyun, former head of Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions Division, said at a forum in May that “we have to be cautious about the year of 2028,” citing a possible slowdown in tech companies’ investments and expanding memory supply from China. That’s a notably different tone from the confident capacity-doubling pledges both Samsung and SK hynix have made in public investment announcements this year.
SK hynix’s own CEO has been blunt about the supply picture. SK Hynix Chief Executive Kwak Noh-Jung said the global memory industry is heading for its worst-ever supply shortage in 2027, with demand for memory continuing to outrun the company’s ability to make it well into the next decade, even with aggressive capacity expansion. Kwak made the comments the day the South Korean chipmaker began trading on the Nasdaq, hardly a moment chosen to spook investors — which makes the admission carry more weight, not less.
The freshly announced southwestern Korean “megacluster” fabs, meanwhile, remain vague on scheduling. The announcement includes enormous sums, but so far no reliable schedules for construction or production start at the four fabs, with Chey pointing out that building the existing SK hynix cluster in Yongin had taken around nine years. If that pace repeats, the newest wave of investment won’t touch shelf prices for the better part of a decade.
What It Costs Gamers Building PCs and Buying Consoles
None of this is abstract for anyone shopping for a gaming rig or a new console. Rising memory costs are already rippling through PCs, smartphones, and game consoles, and the DRAM lawsuit’s complaint even cites Apple’s recent price increases on iPads and Macs as evidence of the downstream impact of the alleged supply restrictions. DDR5 kits, GPU VRAM costs and prebuilt system prices have all been climbing through 2026, and Australian and New Zealand buyers converting from USD and KRW-denominated component pricing typically feel currency swings on top of the underlying shortage.
Whatever the courts eventually decide about coordination versus coincidence, the numbers now on the table — a lawsuit alleging deliberate scarcity, and independent bank forecasts putting genuine relief no earlier than 2028 — leave plenty of room for scrutiny of an industry that has, by its own admission, chosen AI memory margins over cheap, plentiful DDR4 and DDR5 for everyday PCs and consoles.
Join the Conversation