Apple to raise prices due to memory chip shortage, says CEO Tim Cook - Newswire

Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that the company is considering raising prices for some of its products due to soaring costs of memory and storage chips, driven by surging demand from the artificial intel... Read original →

The AI data center gold rush for HBM and DRAM is triggering 'memory inflation' across consumer electronics. Even Apple, with its $200B cash war chest, can’t fully absorb surging costs—signaling memory’s shift from commodity to strategic asset. Technically, AI’s exclusive demand for high-bandwidth, low-latency memory is diverting TSMC’s CoWoS advanced packaging capacity toward NVIDIA, indirectly inflating Apple’s A/M-series chip costs. Geopolitically, tightening U.S.-Japan-South Korea export controls risk fragmenting the global memory supply chain, especially impacting packaging/test hubs in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong, China. Samsung and SK Hynix will prioritize AI clients, forcing Qualcomm and MediaTek into longer lead times and premium pricing. Over the next 18 months, broad-based price hikes for non-AI devices are inevitable, squeezing smaller OEMs and accelerating market consolidation.