(Image credit: Future)
RAMageddon has hit us hard this year — doing everything from raising the prices of MacBooks and iPads, pricing the Steam Machine out of console contention, and ruining Prime Day (selling something at MSRP discounted from an inflated price is not a deal).But the people are fighting back. A group of individuals and small businesses have launched a class action lawsuit against the big three memory makers (Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron), which accuses them of price fixing and market manipulation.Basically, in the chaos of the AI data center boom, these plaintiffs are calling BS and want to take a look under the hood for any colluding under the Sherman Act. Let me get you caught up on what’s happening, and whether there’s a case here.The reality of the RAMpocalypse
(Image credit: Future)We’ve seen it play out in real-time throughout all of 2026 — last week most prominently when Apple products were hit hard with memory-related price spikes. And when companies like the Cupertino crew want memory, they go to the big three: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.These are a tight oligopoly that control around 90% of the global DRAM market, and after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signed a letter of intent to spend $1.4 trillion on memory (which was then quietly rolled back to way less), there’s been a scramble to snap up as much high-bandwidth memory (HBM) as possible.That’s caused the cost of consumer RAM to surge by an astronomical 700%, but is this all because of AI? This case alleges no, and accuses them of price-fixing and market-manipulation — artificially creating shortages to gouge prices.
