Micron is forced to stop under-investing in plants and will increase production. This will trigger everyone else to expand production and lower prices.

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.

>It’s made outside of the US using non-American tooling.

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.

> 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 would lose access to their largest market, I'm sure shareholders would havesomething to say about that ?

Arbitrage?

US is the vast majority of their market - Apple, hyper-scalers, AI labs

regime change in South Korea. President Lee Jae Myung isn't exactly popular among Washington circles

memory is a commodity is laughable. Then software engineering is even more a commodity, the amount of engineering going into making memory chips the vast majority of people don't understand. There are a lot of software engineers getting this field after leetcoding and copy from hellointerview. Claude can write you an app in 30 minutes. Try build a lpddr5 dram chip in 30 minutes. Manufacturing know how itself is a specialty and barrier to entry.