apple Plans to raise prices due to the sharp rise in costs of memory and storage chips, CEO Tim Cook He told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in a a report Posted on Wednesday (June 17).
Cook declined to say when the planned price increases will take effect, their size, or the products they will include, according to the report.
“We are doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that were passed on to us, and we were trying to protect our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable,” Cook said, according to the report.
Prices of memory and storage chips have quadrupled over the past year, driven by demand from artificial intelligence companies for the products, according to the report.
In response to rising costs, other smartphone manufacturers have raised prices, as have companies that make personal computers, gaming consoles and other devices that use the chips, the report said.
While Apple is one of the world’s largest chip buyers and has long used its market power to get lower prices from suppliers, the company now has to “wait in line” behind AI companies, according to the report.
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Cook told the Wall Street Journal that he has never seen commodity prices rise as much as he has over the past six months.
“This is a hundred-year flood,” Cook said. “I haven’t seen anything like this in any area in over 40 years.”
It was reported in March that the artificial intelligence industry was causing a shortage of Memory chips Which the smartphone industry needs even as AI features become part of the latest mobile devices.
The report said demand for memory chips from AI data center operators has left device makers facing higher prices and a chip shortage that could cut smartphone sales by 13% this year.
It was reported in January that the global AI boom was beginning to change the economics of smartphones and other consumer electronics by causing mutations Memory components To be converted towards large-scale AI systems under long-term supply agreements.
On June 16 press release About global smartphone sales, Counterpoint Research He said supply chain stability was an increasingly important factor in the industry.
Research Director Tarun Pathak “It is now clear that memory prices will remain high for the rest of 2026, and OEMs have adjusted the rules of the game. To combat these pressures, they are now implementing a combination of price increases, realignment of product launches, and aggressive cost optimization tactics, including hardware ‘feature trimming’ and more efficient channel management,” he said in the statement.
