The United States launches a patent infringement investigation into Samsung memory, with defendants also including NVIDIA, Google, and Broadcom

American memory and patent company Netlist’s patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung continues to escalate. In addition to Samsung, the main defendant, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Super Micro have also been named as downstream defendants.
(Background: HBM memory has already accounted for 63% of AI chip costs, with SK hynix, Samsung, and Micron reaping the compute pricing power.)
(Additional context: Samsung announced that its HBM yield has surpassed 70%! At a speech by CTO Song Zaihe, he said next-generation DRAM must catch up and surpass, aggressively chasing SK hynix.)

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has recently accepted an investigation case titled “Certain DRAM Devices, Products Containing the Same, and Components Thereof (II),” which falls under Section 337 investigations in U.S. trade law. In simple terms, it is a trade weapon the U.S. government uses to block “imported goods that infringe U.S. patents.” Once the investigation is verified, the goods could be directly prevented from entering the United States through customs.

The “(II)” in the title indicates that this is the second case with the same name. The application was filed by Netlist, a company headquartered in Irvine, California, specializing in advanced memory and storage technologies, holding about 210 granted patents and pending applications.

Netlist filed this new lawsuit on June 17, 2026, and at the same time opened another front in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, directly seeking monetary damages.

Netlist’s longstanding feud with Samsung can be traced back to the end of 2021. The previous track record is not difficult to look at: in April 2023, a jury ordered Samsung to pay $303 million in damages; in May 2024, its lawsuit against Micron won another $445 million in damages; and in November of the same year, it scored again—Samsung was ordered to pay an additional $118 million.

Across the three lawsuits combined, Netlist has already obtained infringement damages judgments totaling more than $860 million. And this time, the list of defendants has expanded directly to five companies—the front line is clearly widening.

Why the list of defendants has grown

This time, Netlist has introduced two new patents, claiming “AI memory patents”: US 12,646,537, corresponding to Samsung’s high-bandwidth memory (HBM) products; US 12,650,937, corresponding to Samsung’s DDR5 RDIMM and MRDIMM memory modules.

The party truly accused of infringement, and alleged to have personally created the problematic chips, is only Samsung. Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Super Micro will be listed, not because they themselves made the accused infringement products, but because their AI servers or AI hardware use the accused Samsung memory. This is also the reason behind the phrase in the investigation title: “products containing the same device and components thereof.”

But being implicated doesn’t mean there’s no pressure. For downstream companies like Nvidia and Google, even if Samsung ultimately loses the case, they may not truly be cut off from supply. However, the risk itself—that “the products may be blocked from entering the United States through customs”—is enough to make procurement and legal teams tense, prompting them to plan replacement options in advance. This is exactly the calculation behind Netlist pulling them into the case together: the longer the defendant list, the heavier the leverage at the negotiation table.

When the ITC launches an investigation, it means the case has been formally instituted and accepted, but it does not mean infringement has already been determined. At this stage, it still remains in the phase of allegations and investigation. Netlist has submitted two requests on the ITC side:

• Exclusion order. In short, it asks that the relevant accused infringement products be directly blocked from entering the United States and that imports be prohibited.
• Cease and desist order, which asks the defendants to immediately stop selling within the United States.

Hidden risks in the AI supply chain

HBM is what ties together the entire supply chain because it almost determines the performance ceiling and cost of AI chips. Industry estimates suggest that HBM already accounts for more than 60% of the cost of an AI chip—put another way, the most expensive part of an AI chip is not the compute core, but the surrounding ring of memory. This is the basis for Netlist’s confidence in challenging the entire AI camp with memory patents: as long as that link is blocked, the whole chip can’t move.

The timing is also extremely sensitive. At present, HBM and server DRAM are in short supply, and prices are rising in succession, with memory entering a rare super-cycle of price increases. In this window, any variable on the supply side—including a single import ban—will be magnified and interpreted by the market.

If the ITC ultimately issues an exclusion order against Samsung’s HBM and DDR5, the impact won’t stop at Samsung’s production lines. It would be transmitted downstream along the supply chain—Nvidia’s AI GPUs and Google’s TPUs, AI servers that highly rely on Samsung memory, could also be pulled in. That is the real deadliness of this case, and it is also why Nvidia and Broadcom are being dragged into it this time.

However, the final ruling is still a long way off. A 337 investigation typically takes more than a year to reach a conclusion, and at the current stage it is still only the beginning of allegations and investigation. Still, this case shows that in the AI arms race, the bottleneck isn’t necessarily compute power—it could also be a patent on paper.