Semiconductor History | 450 Golden Gate Avenue — The One That Told, and the Ones That Paid

Between 1 July 1998 and 15 June 2002 the companies that made the world's DRAM agreed among themselves what to charge for it. The buyers were Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Gateway and Apple. The prosecutions were run by the Antitrust Division's San Francisco office and filed in the federal court at 450 Golden Gate Avenue. Micron was in the cartel. Micron also went to the government first, and under the Justice Department's corporate leniency programme the first conspirator through the door is not prosecuted. Its competitors were. Infineon was fined $160 million in October 2004, Hynix $185 million in May 2005, Samsung $300 million that November, and Elpida $84 million in January 2006. Eighteen individuals were charged over the course of the investigation and most were convicted. Executives served months in American prisons. Micron did not come out of it clean. In December 2003 the department charged one of its regional sales managers with obstruction of justice for withholding and altering documents demanded by a grand jury subpoena; he pleaded guilty and served six months of home detention. Europe reached the same finding. On 19 May 2010 the European Commission fined nine manufacturers a total of €331 million, Elpida's share being €8.5 million, and Micron was immune there too for the same reason. Of the four companies fined in the United States, one no longer exists in any form. Elpida filed for reorganisation in 2012 and Micron bought it the following year. The competitor Micron reported was, seven years later, the competitor Micron absorbed. Three companies now make almost all of the world's DRAM. In June 2026 all three were sued in this same courthouse in a class action alleging that they had coordinated a shift of capacity toward high-bandwidth memory and pushed prices up sharply. Earlier civil claims on similar ground have not succeeded. This one is untested and the allegations are unproven. The building is the Phillip Burton Federal Building and United States Courthouse, at Golden Gate and Polk in the Civic Center. It is open to the public and district court hearings are listed daily. Photo: Marincyclist, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons