Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing
en.sedaily.com
en.sedaily.com
It's the people and country that suffer when our government fails to ensure markets are free and fair.
Why not ask the same ridiculous amount of money your competitors do? People seem to be paying for it. Their fault. If suppliers have sufficiently different products, they can make some more expensive, others cheaper; on average, everybody pays more. A high barrier to entry might help such practices.
That doesn't mean I'm saying this is what is happening. Sometimes things just suck, and somebody bought the world's supply of RAM wafers to use as frisbees.
Tacit collusion requires at least signaling. There has to be some intent. Like in the US rental market where Realpage coordinates tacit collusion.
But if there is legitimately demand for far more memory than can be produced, it seems silly to claim collusion to raise prices.
But yeah, if there's demand a limited supply, price increases from that are legit.
That's not how commodity markets work. This stuff is essentially sold at auction with the price set by supply and demand. The way they would fix the price is by constraining supply so that people have to outbid each other on a smaller amount of inventory.
But that's not that hard to measure -- are they producing less than they were before prices went up? The answer is actually that they're producing more. The reason prices went up anyway is the huge increase in demand.
You would then have to make the case that it's not just that they're reducing supply but that they're not increasing it fast enough. That's theoretically possible but it's also very plausible that building new fabs just takes time, so if someone's theory is that they're colluding then they need to present some evidence.
That also isn't illegal. A business can choose to artificially restrict supply if they want, there's no mandate that they must meet demand.
It only crosses into illegal territory if multiple companies get together and secretly agree to cap production to keep prices high. Then it becomes collusion. It also becomes illegal if there's a monopoly power that is intentionally constricting supply to specifically stop a smaller competitor or lock them out of the market.
The hard part is how do you prove Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron are acting as a unified cartel when there obviously isn't going to be a paper trail for secret meetings.
There is, however, no incentive to do this when prices are high unless you expect competitors to do likewise, since otherwise you're just handing the business to the others when they increase production. Which strongly implies that if that's what everybody is doing, they're colluding.
> The hard part is how do you prove Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron are acting as a unified cartel when there obviously isn't going to be a paper trail for secret meetings.
Which is the problem when that's what's happening, and why we should maybe change the law to infer the collusion from the outcome in cases where prices are high yet nobody is responding by increasing their market share.
No one has a crystal ball. Soviet planners figured that out eventually. You cannot punish people for lack of crystal ball outcome foresight.
Are we going to punish Micron for not planning a new fab 3 year ago when they had no margin and Apple was squeezing them to the bone? Do we co-indict Tim Apple?
Or wait, they were already trying to build one in Upstate NY that is stuck in NIMBY red tape. Do we co-indict Kathy Hochul?
This is why you expect the response to happen over a short period of years rather than absolutely instantaneously.
> Or wait, they were already trying to build one in Upstate NY that is stuck in NIMBY red tape. Do we co-indict Kathy Hochul?
Yes, definitely.
This imagines a world where water production can be dialed up and down instantly, at no cost, with no risk.
It doesn’t work that way though. Hiring people, scaling up factories, converting to 24/7 all have costs and risks.
Just google (or Claude, or whatever) memory companies that went backrupt overbuilding to meet a spike in demand. There are many. You probably don’t even know their names. Because Micron/etc stood pat and survived.
It only images a world in which the profit-maximizing amount of wafer production is higher when demand is higher, which is a completely reasonable premise to take as the default.
> Just google (or Claude, or whatever) memory companies that went backrupt overbuilding to meet a spike in demand. There are many. You probably don’t even know their names. Because Micron/etc stood pat and survived.
Those long forgotten companies like Intel, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, IBM, etc. that are all now bankrupt and no longer exist. Except that they still do exist, they just sold their DRAM divisions to the current incumbents. Even the divisions that went bankrupt -- for Qimonda (Infineon) it was the 2008 housing crash that did them in.
Predicting events like that isn't reasonably possible. What Micron actually did to survive it was keep a large reserve of cash to survive the lean years, not refuse to build fabs. The South Korean companies did the equivalent by being subsidiares of giant conglomerates.
And let’s not forget Elpida.
Here’s a good article on the economics of the industry and why huge swings in margins make capital investment risky: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Semicon...
If there's no evidence to be found, that might be a good indicator that either A.) nothing illegal occured or B.) the senior leadership involved are competent, intelligent, and discrete
Given the number of companies involved, all it takes is one idiot, so if it's collusion, I expect we'll see evidence. If not, number go up.
If it's the actual physical agreement that's the problem - the system is working as intended.
But if we are looking to prevent the negative outcomes associated with price fixing and collusion, our system is failing us.
They are never going to find proof of conspiracy. The people involved covered their tracks, and doing so is trivial. So the best we can do is punish the appearance of collusion. And if the goal is to actually prevent harm to customers, that's a better solution anyway, since it encourages leaders of companies to behave in a manner that's the opposite of collusion.
I would look at questions regarding what harm is created: Is it discriminatory? Are parts of society shutting down, and is that unreasonable? Are groups of people now unable to afford a living? Does it move the poverty line? Is that permanent? And how do you prove this is exclusively due to the price increase of tech components, and RAM specifically?
It needs to be unfuzzy in some way in order to make sense, but that's just my opinion.
I do agree prices are insane and wish for them to come down today. I liked the ubiquitous amounts of RAM any system could have. In those days, forums were also filled with how insanely expensive 32 gigabytes of RAM was, about $100 :)
"Things cost more because of collusion" is always a harm. It doesn't matter if the product is maize or gold-plated haute couture, competitors are supposed to compete.
The question is, what's the best way to tell the difference between tacit collusion and just normal supply and demand?
It's not that easy, but here's a decent test: It's tacit conclusion if 1) net margins have been high for e.g. 3 years and 2) no new companies have entered the market in that period of time, or were acquired by an incumbent if they did.
Notice that this works for everything. Even if you're making luxury goods, the price may be high, but so are production costs, and there is a lower volume to amortize fixed costs over, so long-term net margins should be the same as they are anywhere else or you should see new entrants. If you don't, it's reasonable to infer collusion and leave it on the companies to prove otherwise.
That breaks down for industries with long investment cycles. It takes years to build a fab, so the fact that DRAM prices have been high for 1-2 years isn't too suspicious, considering they've been burned by boom and bust cycles before.
>Notice that this works for everything. Even if you're making luxury goods, the price may be high, but so are production costs, and there is a lower volume to amortize fixed costs over, so long-term net margins should be the same as they are anywhere else or you should see new entrants. If you don't, it's reasonable to infer collusion and leave it on the companies to prove otherwise.
I can't tell you don't buy luxury goods ;)
People don't pay $10k+ for a Hermes bag because they want something that carries stuff 100% (or even 1%) better than a normal bag. They're buying it for the brand image/history. That's not something that can be replicated by a new entrant with some money to splash out on R&D or even marketing.
Indeed, it takes around 3 years to build a fab, which is why it's not weird to see this at 1-2 years. And meanwhile not only are the incumbents building more fabs, so are the challengers. CXMT and Nanya are both building fabs too. Because that's what's expected to happen when prices go up in the absence of collusion, you get more supply and new entrants.
> People don't pay $10k+ for a Hermes bag because they want something that carries stuff 100% (or even 1%) better than a normal bag. They're buying it for the brand image/history.
You're talking about Veblen goods in particular, not luxury goods in general. Veblen goods are bonkers, but they also don't fail the test, because then there will be plenty of other companies offering similar products at lower margins without the brand name, and then you don't have an industry you suspect of collusion over everyone having suspiciously high margins because many of them don't.
Gamers Nexus has done a lot of reporting on it as of late [1][2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal [1] https://youtu.be/R1jsbfouRQY?is=PZnyIjUjSK5UuGpL [2] https://youtu.be/jVzeHTlWIDY?is=PZOHQaaqb49hcBs9
Yes it does lmao. If consumers can't get access to devices then they cannot be used for work or education. It's counterproductive.
How many "attention is all you need" papers aren't being written because as soon as there's a sniff of money the rabid suit and tie MBA fucks leap onto any opportunity like a dog in heat and fuck it to death.
Wait until you discover TSMC, ASML, Carl Zeiss, Intel and AMD, or even Nvidia.
“ The district court ruled in favor of Samsung, Hynix, and Micron and dismissed the lawsuit. This dismissal was affirmed on appeal by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in March 2022 that the plaintiffs did not offer sufficient plausible evidence for their allegations to make a case under the Sherman Antitrust Act and that the district court properly dismissed the lawsuit.”
Samsung is about to hand out ~$26B in bonuses. SK Hynix something similar-ish.
It’s different to, say, Google’s vertical monopoly in advertising where that’s most of their revenue.
AMD just re-released their 5800X3D for AM4 board users who wish to upgrade which is further evidence that shutting off DDR4 production is premature.
2. In a healthy, competitive market there would be smaller manufacturers that’d be happy to take up the big guys’ discarded business.
2. Semiconductor manufacturing is the most complex industrial process in the world. You need billions of capex and decades of experience. Even existing semi players like intel cannot switch production to memory.
China CXMT is gaing traction in DDR market. New fabs from all players wil come online in the next two years.
Have you seen how the modern stock markets works lmao? It hasn't been based on reality in a long time.
Hell just look at Trump, should've run outta money from all his bad deals ages ago but the grift continues.
I guess they would love to produce it themselves, but for the average scenario the production reserves they have with Samsung already work well enough and prevent them from having to get into such a complicated industry.
When making long term plans in 2022, I don't think anyone expected DDR4 to need significant production in 2026. Since ram makers can pretty much sell whatever they make in today's marketplace, it makes sense (for those fabs that can) to stop making DDR4 and repurpose those fabs to make newer generation ram.
That's what I have in my gaming tower, and yeah I feel zero pressing need to upgrade. I did manage to put 64GB of DDR4 in it just before prices went totally bonkers, thankfully. Where I'm falling behind is my GPU I'm still on an nvidia 1660 super, but I just can't justify paying what they cost right now.
I would gain pretty much nothing moving to a newer board w/ DDR5.
Unfortunately, I opted for only 32GB of RAM because at that point more felt like overkill, which as a decision has aged poorly. I should've gotten more while it was still cheap.
Of course it might be a ploy to sheep-herd consumers and companies towards the expensive DDR-5. I would not put that below the ring of RAM producers.
How much % of the DRAM market do you think is made from computer enthusiasts upgrading their Zen 1/2 CPUs to Zen 3? Note intel and AMD both switched to DDR5 well before the exit from DDR3/DDR4 ("2024-2025", according to the complaint).
While I wouldn't necessarily agree with "a handful of people", the fact is that neither of us can prove their lean -- so no point pursuing that argument thread.
So you might be right that it's a pure numbers/statistics decision. Or I might be right that they want to herd people into the more expensive hardware while forcing them to do so by phasing out production of the cheaper hardware.
No way to truly know IMO. We are exchanging hypotheses.
DDR4 production is likely still quite profitable, just not drowning-in-money AI-bubble profitable. If smaller foundries existed they’d be happy to take up the business.
Maybe really what needs to happen is some busting up of the giants…
Otherwise they could continue to make DDR4 at a higher cost and sold at a higher price to which people will complain price fixing again.
Consumers use these every single day in embedded devices without knowing it.
I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if the embedded DDR3/DDR4 market greatly exceeds the number of consumer desktop computing devices in terms of "devices with memory" (not in sheer IC count or nominal size though.)
The level of design effort and PCB expense to go from DDR3 to DDR5 is enormous.
The answer is an obvious "fuck yeah", even if you ignore the DDR5 price gouging. People will buy it because people still have DDR4 hardware, and that hardware is still extremely relevant.
So if there's a market for it, but none of the suppliers are trying to sell to it... Wtf is happening? Basic capitalism logic says any rational supplier would sell DDR4 for easy profits, meeting an unmet demand. That it isn't happen points to some kind of collusion, IMO.
If I can produce DDR4 for modest profit or HBM for a lot more profit I will obviously produce HBM. And given physical realities producing HBM takes from existing DDR4 production capacity. Worse still, it takes roughly 3GB of ram to produce 1GB of hbm iirc.
The question is whether there’s enough meaningful demand for aftermarket DDR4 upgrades to make it worthwhile to a manufacturer to keep producing DDR4 instead of switching to HBM and DDR5.
Micron claimed retail is a rounding error, a market not worth serving. So you’d presumably need to find industrial buyers who would be willing to buy DDR4.
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...
Right wing interests built up think-tanks after the Second World War, having seen the success of especially the Brookings Institution during the New Deal and world war eras in pushing technocratic-liberalism and wanting to fight fire with fire by creating their own credibility-laundering offices for propaganda advancing the desires of the rich. This effort bore its first great fruit in the mid '70s as Chicago School economists and lobbyists successfully overthrew that enforcement regime and replaced it with one in which specific harm must be proven to win an antitrust case, which de facto ended meaningful anti-trust enforcement in the US and led to the consolidation of money, power, and media over the following decades.
Aaaand... here we are, in the endgame of that movement.
Nobody ever made good native widgets.
(Also, it has a theme engine. The buttons don't look like something out of Windows 3.1 unless you use a Windows 3.1 theme.)
In my opinion, computer touchscreens are one of those things you don't realize how nice they are until you've already gotten used to them and are faced with the sub-par alternative. Say what you will about Windows 11, but it is extremely good for touchscreen interaction. That is not by accident. I strongly believe that any UI that takes touch seriously will significantly enhance its KB+M experience as well because it has knock-on effects on the UI. It's a bit like mobile-first. When you stop treating touchscreens as an afterthought, you are forced to become a better designer. You start thinking more clearly about information density, visual hierarchy+feedback, and most ironic of all, it makes keyboard navigation even more pleasant. I would love to see more focus on touch-friendly desktop apps, even if only for those secondary benefits.
While things may be different now, Windows 8 got panned for trying to put touch elements into a desktop UI. Windows 10 and 11 would abandon that approach.
OpenAI's original corporate agreements capped its returns at 100x, which is seen as too paltry for its current holders, so they scrapped those to prepare for an IPO [0]
That is, in a word, insane.
[0] https://abhs.in/blog/openai-for-profit-conversion-ipo-develo...
Yeah that's how law works. Everyone likes money, but that doesn't mean it's fine to steal money. Yes, even from maligned entities like "big tech" or "private equity"
They are selling the hottest commodity of the day. It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.
The whole point of the collusion is to ensure everyone is producing the same volumes and keeping prices high. The company that expands is the company that "wins" because memory is a volume game and it's all about hanging on the longest during the glut. So once one company expands, the rest have a choice of expanding or planning their exit.
If Samsung and SK lose access to the US market, they'd be fucked long term. Micron would kill them selling at higher margins and higher volumes in the USDM, while the rest are stuck competing for the international scraps - markets Micron is also allowed to compete in, if they wanted to.
> South Korea announces $520bn chip plant project with Samsung, SK Hynix
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/tech/semiconductors/south-k...
No? Cost to produce won't be cheaper just because you have 5 fabs instead of 4. Economies of scale at some level just flatten out so company that chooses to not expand will just enjoy the same level of profit instead of increase
Depends if US can demand ASML which uses plenty of US tech inside. In reality even the DRAM and NAND supply chain has plenty of US technologies.
And you say Micron are US but they have lots of Fabs in Japan as well since they acquired Elpida.
The thing about the US losing its grip on the world and the collapse of the global world order means that the words on the paper don't mean much. Embargoes on Russia didn't mean much so Europeans are physically taking over their ships and Ukrainians are physically sinking the rest of their ships. In Iran nothing other than physically sinking ships and blowing up places meant anything.
Europeans can ship EUV machines because they are physically building them for people who will use these to physically build the most valuable products currently there is. US wasn't able to enforce its will to Iran, what if Koreans, Europeans and the Chinese decide that its not into their interest to act according to US courts?
There is nothing that stops US from building their own Memory Fabs, or asking / funding Micron building more US Fabs. It will cost a more, but the complexity is certainly no where near replicating TSMC.
Most of their revenue comes from America. Not all countries have the same profit margin per user.
So, even if Apple can eventually be fine is it going to be $4T fine?
Global economy means global price competition.
Another interesting effect is that industrial countries typically have MUCH lower average salaries.
This is as biased an Anti-US take as any. Will not grace the rest of the claims with a response.
lol he is not. at no point was he a syrian. his mom was from ohio or something.
Note Steve’s biological mom and biological dad, the Syrian, kept their second child, a girl, and Steve even met her later on in life.
They would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?
In theory yeah, but not at the levels that the US companies are buying.. Last I heard OpenAI is sitting on 50% of the world useless wafers on their own for some reason, and Microsoft cant find a datacenter fast enough to plug their stock in.
I'm a customer, looking for a simple 32GB ddr5 6000 ram, I'm now competing with Microsoft because there isn't enough supply? I'm not sure about that.
Corporations avoid picking fights with large nations where lots of revenue comes from for very obvious reasons.
1) This is not good for Korean/Europen sellers, because it negatively affects sales volume, and is unlikely to be compensated by margins, because a good chunk of those will go towards circumvention instead of the original seller.
2) Some more money will go towards replacing those sellers completely. This is extra not good from the sellers perspective.
It’s been done with processors, modems, SSDs and many other specialized chips. The design and engineering part can already be done at several companies, they just elect not to do anything on the fab side. But they will, if they have to in the long run.
It takes two to four years and Five to twenty billion dollars. Some of the bigger companies, if pushed, particularly, if the alternative is getting chips from China, will do something on the fab side if they absolutely have to. They probably won’t live with the current conditions forever.
There was a company that had three companies say no over about 10 years, eventually, they made a decision to build their own processor known as the M-series…
The problem is... the market consolidated into this oligopoly for a reason. Memory and storage have gone through so, so many pork cycles over the decades.
To make it worse: even if you had the money, ASML is booked out fully for years. You won't get the lithography gear.
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
How many millions are we talking.
If demand for your product has temporarily spiked so high you can have 80% margins, then its not like your competitor has any reason to price compete.
Particularly in an industry where spinning up new capacity is a multi-year $10s of billions investment.
From consumer electronics to the data-center, the rising real mfg costs and lack of supply is putting huge pressure on pricing, and may just drive anyone who cant negotiate with these suppliers out of business.
Once the dominoes start, I fail to see how things recover in less than 3-5 years, not counting all the businesses wiped out in the meanwhile.
There are 3 suppliers in the world that together have ~90% of global DRAM manufacturing capacity. I did not say they definitively were a cartel, but the effect is the same: raising prices together, lack of competition (via market consolidation etc) means there is no viable way to make more capacity in any kind of reasonable time frame, and they all moved most capacity away from consumer products imo to shore up giant deals at locked-in high prices with large buyers.
Now, I find it odd that to this day, there are still only 3 suppliers and ram prices (and SSD prices) have not really followed a reasonable pricing curve save for a few maybe a year pre-thecurrentnonsense, where it was getting closer to what I would have expected [I have not plotted the data for this, I just buy a lot of end-user priced ram and ssds for consumer and businesses, and have noticed the trend of prices staying unusually high compared to other tech]
The current problem is mostly one of there being almost no way to make a new ssd/dram mfg for a bunch of reasons: top of the list is probably IP, then the cost+time. Being in this kind of position on a global scale is probably just immensely satisfying for stakeholders, but my feeling is it is now a global security and financial issue.
My take is: use the force of the state to get them to expand capacity and cap pricing (yes, states of sufficient size can enforce this). If they say "we will take our ball and go home" then invalidate their patents and get to work on domestic backups.
Capitalism will find any way to make more money. It doesnt matter if it harms all the entities that buy their products in the long run - short term gain and "someone will figure it out" will always win the day.
Regan will haunt us till our doom if we dont start enforcing even antitrust.
The core problem is, there is only one company making top-of-the-line lithography processes. Even if you are a government - ASML (and their suppliers) are fully booked out.
And even if you had dozens of billions of euros to sink into such a venture, you'll probably go online right into a bust phase of the pork cycle that drove the consolidations of the last decades.
EDIT: This is also semiconductor-specific. Because there's little additional cost to doubling the output, ramping up production is the hard part
The latter is not a problem I or almost anybody outside those companies care to fix. It's not the public's job to bail out a company because they forced states to intervene to break up their monopoly after taking the highest profits in the industry's history.
Not like it'd be the first time someone shook a stick at them.
At this point the only hope for change is if China finally decides to get in the game rather than just threatening to.
It is not in any way, shape, or form a ruling much less even a piece of well researched work. It's "my side of the story that makes me look perfect, with lawyers turning the heat up to 11"
However the practical penalty for filling absurd lawsuits is zero unless you do it repeatedly to random people for a decade.
Absolutely nothing bad will happen to the plaintiff or the lawyers representing them in this case.
Western legal systems are broken.
If the plaintiff loses the lawsuit a countersuit is pretty unlikely to succeed unless the lawyer participates in gross misconduct. Generally, countersuits are filed more to put the original plaintiff on the defense and don't result in a large judgement.
If you are operating in good faith, then you are pretty insular from kickback as a plaintiff
None, hence the high price of liability baked into basically everything in America. And not just in nominal prices, but in terms of things like restricting access to spaces, restricting access to information, etc.
How can they do price fixing and discontinuing a product at the same time? It just looks like some companies are angry that AI / VC industry is outpricing them.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Not saying I agree with the plaintiffs.
But the challenge is in proving it.
The most expensive foundry / fab isn't the leading edge, it is the "empty" ones. You can't have a fab sitting idle.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_10_...
That's indistinguishable from not wanting to get burned by another semiconductor boom/bust cycle.
So here Samsung and SK Hynix could say they price match to Micron and they are in the clear.
In the U.S., competitors are allowed to act in similar ways in response to economic realities, as long as they each arrive at that decision independently. But publicly anchoring your price to a competitor’s is potentially illegal.
> Price fixing is an agreement (written, verbal, orinferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.
[Emphasis added]
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/AeRZsAeGQAHoYvd36
https://maps.app.goo.gl/cdcbxQuEYLBFVECc7
https://maps.app.goo.gl/k8zAVMrwxkKYsoA8A
https://maps.app.goo.gl/nrQmyShTk9P8YEmo9
Too many consumers think that there are enough differences in additives and detergents between the brands for it to make a significant different in mpg and in maintenance costs, so buy from "their" brand even if there is a cheaper brand nearby.
At one time those consumers would have been right, but first the EPA established certain minimal standards that all brands had to meet. The better brands were still better for your car than the ones just meeting the minimum, but it would take longer for it to make a significant difference.
Then BMW, GM, Honda, and Toyota made a spec for what makes a good detergents and additive mix, and most other major automakers joined. They created a certification, "TOP TIER", that gas companies that met that standard could use.
Nowadays most gas in the US is certified TOP TIER. Generally you will only find non-TOP TIER gas at stations not part of a major chain, at some gas brands owned by grocery chains (Safeway for example), and at some gas brands owned by convenience stores (7-Eleven for example).
Most independent tests have found that and detergents and additives beyond those required for TOP TIER certification do not make a significant difference, even cumulative over 300+k miles.
Nowadays then in the US just buy from any TOP TIER brand and that will be good enough. But consumers don't seem to know that and so for a large number of consumers different brands on the same corner aren't actually in competition.
The whole US gas station market has gotten less competitive over the last 40 years I've been observing prices and big coastal cities are a lot worse than anywhere else.
When I worked at a gas station as a teenager there was definitely an unspoken implicit agreement that the price of gas would be 6 cents/liter above wholesale IIRC. Which was highly competitive and didn't completely cover costs.
Huh? I can go to most any gas station-occupied intersection and you will always find two that match and one (usually a Persian-owned Chevron) which is consistently a dollar or more higher per gallon across all grades of fuel.
No, the key term is "collusion", which could be done in the open or not. If a competitor told you they were unilaterally raising prices in secret, that would still be legal. Where you get into trouble is if you are cooperating to set prices. And no, this is all determined by a judge so cute workarounds like "I'm telling my competitors that I'm raising prices then gauging his body language" won't work.
Gas prices are posted on massive highly visible signs and are public information. This wasn't collusion, it was a sign of intense but friendly competition.
Price fixing is a many-to-one all the manufactures agree to the highest prices they all agree on and set it there.
If you think a private agreement to fix the price at an artificially inflated level is the same as a public offer to lower the price based on competitors, I have little hope for any business venture you may partake/undertake
This is like if you showed a supermarket that their competitor's oranges were more expensive, and they "matched" by raising their prices for everyone.
You can put some memory on the logic wafer (SRAM) but it's area inefficient, which is wasteful on your expensive N2 wafer. So a dedicated DRAM process is vastly cheaper per bit, even at current elevated prices.
Bonus though, Apple is using "defective" chips in other products now such as the Neo which will help some with costs, but overall, you can't just add memory to the chip because the chip can become very yield sensitive, the process has to be there to produce the yield effectively.