The Memory Boom Has Been a Gift to Micron. For Apple, It's Becoming a Problem. Or Is It?
The same shortage delivering record profits to memory makers is now squeezing one of the world's most valuable companies -- and its CEO says customers will end up paying for it.
The Memory Boom Has Been a Gift to Micron. For Apple, It's Becoming a Problem. Or Is It?
Overview
For more than a year, the shortage of memory and storage chips has been a one-way windfall. As artificial intelligence (AI) data centers soaked up the world's supply, prices for these chips have about doubled over the past year, and the companies that make them -- Micron (NASDAQ: MU) among them -- have been some of the biggest winners of the AI boom. Now those rising costs are landing on the companies that buy the chips.
Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) buys an enormous amount of memory for its devices. So when memory prices jump, Apple's costs jump too. CEO Tim Cook made that plain this week.
Details
"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," Cook said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."
Source
Originally published at www.fool.com.
