Los Angeles Plaintiffs Sue Airbnb for Price Gouging During 2025 Wildfires

A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles accuses Airbnb of price gouging during the 2025 wildfires by using automated pricing that plaintiffs say drove short-term rental rates up when housing was scarce.

“DRAM and NAND prices surge up to 98% in a single quarter, and it’s about to get worse AI's insatiable appetite for high-bandwidth memory is starving the conventional chip market, sending costs soaring for everything from laptops to data centers Remember when a 1 TB SSD cost about $45”

Crypto Briefing

The mezha.net complaint says Airbnb allegedly employed dynamic pricing and algorithmic mechanisms that raised rates on peak days of fires and evacuations, imposing financial pressure on residents seeking temporary lodging during the emergency.

Crypto Briefing

Plaintiffs say the company violated California consumer protection laws, as well as antitrust norms and price-transparency requirements, and they are seeking damages and an injunction against such practices in the future.

The case is framed as potentially reshaping short term rental rules in California, with the article noting that Airbnb representatives have not yet issued official comments regarding the suit.

DRAM and NAND prices surged up to 98% in a single quarter, and Crypto Briefing says it is about to get worse as AI’s demand for high-bandwidth memory starves the conventional chip market.

The article attributes the shift to major memory manufacturers Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, which it says are aggressively shifting production capacity toward high-bandwidth memory that powers AI accelerators in data centers.

mezha.net

Crypto Briefing reports that conventional DRAM contract prices rose 90-98% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, while NAND flash contract prices jumped 55-100% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, with Samsung reportedly hitting the peak end of that range.

It adds that TrendForce revised projections for Q2, forecasting NAND flash prices could climb an additional 70-75% and DRAM could see further increases of 58-75%, with suppliers reporting sold-out capacities across conventional memory product lines.

Etched, described as a rising challenger in the AI chip wars, issued a progress report after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year, saying it has already booked $1 billion in contract orders for full systems powered by those chips.

“Nvidia AI chip competitor Etched issued a progress report on Tuesday, after TSMC successfully manufactured its chip earlier this year”

TechCrunch

TechCrunch says Etched is testing its first product with customers and calls the bundled offering “frontier inference clusters,” which it says include the chips along with custom-designed racks and software to run inference faster, more cheaply, and with better power efficiency than rivals.

The company also said it has raised a total of $800 million to date, with the most recent tranche being an unannounced $500 million round closed in December at a $5 billion post-money valuation.

TechCrunch further reports that Etched has attracted investors including VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Two Sigma, Ribbit Capital, and Stripes, and it secured angel investment from AI heavyweights including Andrej Karpathy, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Arthur Mensch, and Scott Wu.