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  • I also feel like there should be FTC or other antitrust actions against OpenAI and other hyperscalers, with nvidia being complicit, if they are cornering the market that badly on consumer RAM, SSD and other components, especially if these volume purchases are for projected datacenter that haven't even broken ground (or have been paid for) for many months.

    Furthermore, I think there should be a tax on algorithmic inefficiency, in that if a LLM, frontier or not, consumes more than a certain amount of KWH per token, it should be taxed such as to put emphasis on models than can run locally, on a normal PC

    by caycep
  • What happens if Samsung and SK Hynix simply stop selling to US at all? Micron is in US but are the rest still in the US jurisdiction?

    They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.

    by mrtksn
  • Everybody in our industry loves fat margins. But god forbid if someone else captures the margins and squeeze them out of easy profits.
    by glimshe
  • Maybe software people can get around this issue by not making every app a electron bloat? This is now more than doable now you got AI right? And it will save your job
    by russli1993
  • Antitrust and anticompetitive behavior continue to evolve. Back when the Sherman Act was passed, we were talking about backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms. One of the more important ways of recent years is where all or most competitors in a market use the same software that outputs the same value as to what they should charge. This is effective collusion even if it isn't explicit. The goal of such software is to raise prices. You raise prices by effectively or actually colluding with other market participants.

    The posterchild for this is RealPage [1]. But you're going to see this pop up in every aspect of life, such as gas prices [2] and meat processing [3].

    The whole thing is kind of depressing because this is what "innovation" is now: fancy ways to collude on prices.

    [1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...

    [2]: https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/ai-helping-gas-stations-col...

    [3]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-a...

    by jmyeet
  • HBM is also DRAM. I also think it's kind of a weak argument to say that them discontinuing ddr3 (which while in use still today in industrial/embedded was on the way out for consumers 10 years ago) and ddr4 which last had consumer CPUs for it 3 years ago is meaningful. What we need now is ddr5. Turning off the old fabs and moving those resources including people to ddr5 is a good thing. That's not price fixing. It's possible price fixing is in play, but discontinuing products people objectively don't use as much anymore isn't it.
    by Neywiny
  • It wouldn't be a first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
    by tommy_axle
  • This was attempted before in 2022 but fell apart because plaintiff couldn't show an agreement took place https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2022/03/07/2...
    by cbg0

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Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing · Birbla