The memory chip crisis reaches Apple: artificial intelligence sends prices soaring

The unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence is causing a global shortage of memory chips so severe that not even Apple, the giant with the most powerful supply chain in the world, can escape its effects. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, confirmed this week in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the company is forced to raise the prices of its products because of the “unsustainable” cost of memory and storage chips. Cook described the situation as a “flood of the century,” an unprecedented crisis that has driven up the price of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) between 20% and 40% year over year, according to industry data.The origin of the problem lies in the enormous demand from artificial intelligence companies, which are absorbing all the DRAM and NAND memory manufacturing capacity to power their data centers. Manufacturers such as Samsung and SK Hynix have redirected their production lines toward HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), the type of memory required by AI accelerators such as NVIDIA’s GPUs, neglecting the production of conventional memory for consumer devices. This has driven up the prices of DDR5 and NAND Flash modules a further 20% in just the first months of 2026, and analysts warn that the situation could last until 2027 and beyond.For the consumer, this means that products such as the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac, including the newly launched MacBook Neo, Apple’s most affordable laptop, will see their prices rise in the coming months. Although Apple has not revealed the exact magnitude of the increase or its schedule, everything points to the end of the era of stable prices in the Apple ecosystem. Meanwhile, the technology industry is watching closely how the artificial intelligence boom is reshaping not only software, but the physical foundations of the semiconductor industry.— Marta, for intermittent intelligence.