Micron (MU) Loses Bid to Toss DRAM Collusion Suit Citing 171.8% Price Rise

Judge Wise Refuses to Dismiss DRAM Case

A federal judge in California has refused to dismiss a proposed class action accusing Micron (MU), Samsung and SK Hynix of colluding to shrink conventional DRAM supply, clearing the case to proceed. Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California denied the three memory makers’ joint motion to dismiss on Saturday, November 14.

The order finds the complaint “plausibly alleged” an agreement among the defendants in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, the federal antitrust statute that prohibits contracts and conspiracies in restraint of trade. Every ground of the dismissal motion was rejected. The court stressed this is an early procedural judgment: at this stage the plaintiffs’ allegations are taken as true, and nothing has been proven.

The suit was filed on June 25, 2026 by 17 consumers and small businesses across five states. Their complaint states that the three companies together held more than 91% of global DRAM revenue as of the third quarter of 2025, began curtailing conventional output in late 2022 and moved capacity into high-bandwidth memory (HBM) from 2023. HBM, the stacked memory built for AI accelerators, consumes roughly three to four times the wafer area per gigabyte of standard DDR5, the complaint notes. As capacity shifted, conventional DRAM prices rose 171.8% in the year to the third quarter of 2025 and 697% over 18 months, while, it argues, none of the three announced a meaningful expansion plan.

The court docket lists entry No. 68, dated November 14, as the order on the motion to dismiss; the full text is available through PACER for a fee. Micron shares were 1.10% higher over the past 24 hours after the order.

COINOTAG data puts Micron (MU) at $764.93 right now, inside a 24-hour range of $740.72 to $765.53, with the daily chart still in a downtrend: the 14-day RSI reads 42.2 while the MACD signal has turned bullish. The strongest support below the market sits at $747.45, scored 84 out of 100 on COINOTAG’s composite, and the nearest strong resistance at $822.89, scored 96 out of 100. Perpetual futures positioning shows open interest of $142.1 million and a funding rate of 0.0145% per interval. A decisive break of $747.45 would put the legal overhang back in charge; a run at $822.89 before the December 7 answers would suggest investors view the case as manageable.

Why the DRAM II Precedent Did Not Stick

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron argued the case was a rerun of DRAM II, in which the Ninth Circuit in 2022 upheld the dismissal of similar supply-restraint claims covering 2016 to 2018. Judge Wise wrote that it is not. On timing, SK Hynix and Micron announced their production cuts three weeks apart in late 2022, and Samsung followed roughly four and a half months later, on April 7, 2023, a gap the order found not long enough to defeat an inference of coordinated action at the pleading stage. The shift to HBM alone might not be enough, she allowed, but the surrounding conduct points toward the plaintiffs. All three signed long-term HBM supply contracts, Samsung and SK Hynix reportedly declined long-term deals with large conventional DRAM customers, and Micron said on December 3, 2025 that it would shut Crucial, a consumer brand it had operated for 30 years. Those steps, the order found, are hard to reverse, if not impossible, and no rational company would take them without a prior agreement.

The complaint also points to near-identical customer vetting adopted by all three defendants in January 2026, which the judge said strongly supports a plausible conspiracy inference. The companies attributed the practice to surging AI demand; the order notes it appeared only after the AI boom and the HBM pivot were already underway. Three of the plaintiffs’ theories did not survive: Micron’s investor remarks about “supply discipline,” meetings between executives at industry conferences and the oligopoly structure of the market itself. The filing also recalls the 1998 to 2002 DRAM price-fixing cartel, for which Samsung paid a $300 million fine and SK Hynix $185 million, while Micron escaped penalty as a cooperating witness. At the hearing, counsel for the defendants invoked Judge Posner’s line that competitors in a concentrated market watch each other like eagles. Judge Wise answered that the plaintiffs allege more than that: eagles flying in formation, which eagles do not ordinarily do.

Samsung is represented by O’Melveny & Myers, SK Hynix by Cleary Gottlieb and Micron by Gibson Dunn; the plaintiffs are represented by Bathaee Dunne. Answers are due December 7, 2026, and the first case management conference is set for January 12, 2027.