Apple CEO Tim Cook Warns of Significant Rise in Memory Costs
Apple CEO Tim Cook has warned investors that the company will face "significantly higher" memory costs starting in June, a pressure that will last for multiple quarters.
SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron have confirmed that HBM, DRAM, and NAND capacities are sold out until 2026-2027, with customers booking years in advance, causing high-bandwidth memory prices to soar over 1000%.
Market Mechanism: AI giants and sovereign AI projects are hoarding memory chips, leading to a severe supply-demand imbalance. Goldman Sachs predicts a 4.9% shortage in DRAM supply by 2026, the worst in 15 years, with capital flowing to memory manufacturers, putting pressure on the consumer electronics and PC supply chains.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Apple, as one of the strongest companies in the global supply chain, has previously dealt with chip shortages through long-term contracts and vertical integration. However, the current AI-driven memory crisis is still affecting the company, reflecting that the demand for high-end memory like HBM far exceeds supply.
In terms of capital flow, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, xAI, and various sovereign AI projects have locked in capacity in advance, pushing memory manufacturers to expand production. However, in the short term, supply cannot meet demand, leading to chain reactions such as the delay of Sony PS6 and the sell-out of Western Digital hard drives.
Similar to the automotive chip crisis of 2021-2022 or the AI training computing power shortage in 2023, we are currently in a phase where AI infrastructure construction is causing a restructuring of the traditional consumer electronics supply chain, with memory becoming the new bottleneck.
Structural Judgment: This is essentially a restructuring of the industrial chain, where the explosive demand for high-bandwidth memory for AI training and inference is reshaping the semiconductor supply-demand landscape. The mechanism is that the capital-intensive expansion cycle lags behind the growth rate of demand, leading to a transfer of pricing power for high-end memory to suppliers, which is then transmitted to the downstream consumer electronics and PC markets, forcing giants like Apple to adjust their product strategies and cost structures.