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Governments have sued DRAM companies for price fixing and forming cartels before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing. They can absolutely step in and if there are evidence of price fixing or anti-competitive behaviours, can impose fines. The choice of whether to do that though is political.


And on that page govts have tried and failed at it also. Thinking the current prices are the result of fixing and not insane demand is surely going to lose in court. It’s trivial to show massive demand, and thus production line changes, as the driving forces here.

If you look over all such lawsuits, they extremely rarely succeed.


Is there any allegations of price fixing in this case? The demand just skyrocketed. Other than legislation like the defense act in the US I don’t know of any governments that have jurisdiction over these ram makers that mandate companies produce more of a product.

Especially not for consumer goods.


If they're charging one customer $X and another customer $5X for the same chips... there's got to be some law about this.


I missed that this is happening, is it really? I thought it's 5X for everyone


Supposedly OpenAI is paying 2025 prices.


So you mean people with contracts are having their contracts honoured.... thats just normal business.


Several of these companies almost went under before the AI boom. There isn’t a cartel.




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