US FTC Chair: Soaring Chip Prices Are "Insane," Considers Deploying Antitrust Tools
Nashnova编辑部
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson called the recent chip price surge 'insane' and said the agency can deploy standard antitrust tools against upstream monopoly power. This means → U.S. regulators are shifting from watching the AI boom to actively policing chip pricing power.
Why is the FTC chair suddenly targeting chip prices?
Ferguson made it personal: he wanted to upgrade his PC a year ago, memory was affordable, so he waited — six months later the price shocked him into walking away.
His core position is blunt: the upstream inputs to AI must stay competitive. No single link in the supply chain should be allowed to bottleneck the market and raise prices for everyone downstream.
This means → the FTC has elevated chip supply-chain competition to the top of its antitrust priority list.
What if Nvidia and ARM tried to merge?
Asked about a hypothetical Nvidia–ARM merger, Ferguson chose his words carefully but left no ambiguity: "We would have to look very carefully at that."
He then decoded his own bureaucrat-speak: that phrase means "we would have concerns."
In plain terms = Nvidia already dominates AI chips. If it also absorbed ARM — the company that designs the underlying architecture for mobile and AI processors — pricing power over the entire AI compute supply chain would concentrate further. That is exactly the scenario the FTC fears most.
What does the DRAM class-action lawsuit allege?
In June, a class-action suit was filed in U.S. court against the three dominant DRAM manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — which together control roughly 90% of the DRAM market. DRAM is the memory chip found in virtually every electronic device.
The core allegation: all three coordinated to restrict supply, driving DRAM prices up a cumulative 697% from 2022 to 2026 — and none expanded capacity even as prices hit record highs.
This reflects a critical signal: if the allegations hold, the chip price surge is not just demand outstripping supply — it is artificially manufactured scarcity.
Have these companies done this before?
The answer is yes. In the mid-2000s, Samsung and SK Hynix pleaded guilty to DRAM price-fixing.
Samsung paid a $300 million fine — the second-largest criminal antitrust penalty in U.S. history at the time.
This means → the current lawsuit is not without precedent. Same defendants, same market, similar alleged playbook — the historical record significantly raises the plausibility of the charges.
Where are rising chip costs already hitting consumers?
According to Haver Analytics, Samsung tablets and Xbox consoles are expected to rise 20% to 25% in price next year.
Amazon recently announced a 60% price increase on its main hardware products, citing chip shortages as the direct cause.
Nvidia has reportedly told its largest customers to expect price hikes of at least 15% next year.
In plain terms = chip inflation is not an "industry-only" problem — it is the extra money you pay the next time you buy a tablet, a console, or a cloud subscription.
What comes next?
Two nodes to watch: whether the FTC's rhetoric turns into actual enforcement, and how the DRAM class-action plays out in court.
Ferguson drew a clear line: regulators should not make predictive interventions on where AI technology itself goes. But upstream supply-chain monopoly? "We can use ordinary antitrust tools — this is just regular industrial-organization economics."
This means → if the FTC acts, the target will not be AI itself — it will be the handful of chip suppliers sitting at AI's chokepoint.
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