A week before Apple raised prices on its most popular computers and tablets, Tim Cook sat down with the Wall Street Journal and used a phrase that stopped people mid-scroll. He called the memory chip shortage hitting Apple’s supply chain “a hundred-year flood.” He said he had never seen anything like it in 40 years in the industry.
Elon Musk read the quote and immediately agreed. “Biggest price jump in anything I’ve ever seen too,” he posted on X.
The two men are not often aligned. On this they are. And what they are describing has already started showing up in the prices consumers pay for MacBooks, iPads, and soon iPhones.
What Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal about the memory chip shortage
Cook’s WSJ interview landed in mid-June, but the real consequences came on June 25. CNBC reported that Apple announced price increases for Macs and iPads by hundreds of dollars that morning. Apple’s online store briefly went down as the updated prices went live. The stock fell more than 6%, the worst single-day drop since April 2025.
“This is a hundred-year flood,” Cook told the Journal. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
He had already told investors on Apple’s April earnings call that “significantly higher memory costs” were coming in the June quarter. By mid-June, the situation had moved from a warning to an announcement.
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“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said. “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.”
Apple’s own statement was just as direct.
“The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge,” the company said. “The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage. We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”
Why Elon Musk agreeing with Cook is the most telling part of this story
When Musk posted his agreement on X, he was not just endorsing Cook’s frustration. He was confirming the severity of the shortage from the other side of the trade.
SpaceX‘s Colossus data center in Memphis is one of the largest AI training clusters on earth. Musk’s xAI and SpaceX operations are precisely the kind of AI infrastructure buildout that has been consuming memory and storage chips at a pace the supply chain cannot match. Cook is paying the price for a shortage that Musk’s own operations are helping to create.
Both CEOs calling the same shortage historic is the detail that matters. The companies paying the cost of the memory crunch and the companies driving it have arrived at the same conclusion about how severe it is.
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How memory chip prices got to where they are in 2026
Memory and storage chip prices have quadrupled in the past three quarters, according to Counterpoint Research, cited by CNBC. The cause is structural. Hyperscalers including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon need massive amounts of high-bandwidth memory to run AI data centers. Chip suppliers are steering production toward that demand because it is higher-margin and comes in larger, more predictable orders.
Consumer electronics makers including Apple, Dell, HP, and Nintendo get what is left over.
Right now, that is not much.
Micron’s most recent quarter captures how fast the market has shifted. The company’s revenue quadrupled year-over-year and its gross margin jumped from 39% to 84.9%, surpassing Nvidia and Meta. For memory suppliers, this shortage is a windfall. For everyone buying memory, it is the opposite.
The Wall Street Journal published a chart showing computer software and accessories prices rising about 15% year-over-year, something that last happened in the 1980s. The Journal called the AI data center buildout “a third wave of inflation,” after the energy and food inflation waves of 2022 and 2023.
How far the memory chip crisis is spreading beyond Apple
Apple is the most visible company absorbing the cost, but it is far from the only one. HP, Dell, and Nintendo have already raised prices on their products. Best Buy’s incoming CEO Jason Bonfig told reporters the company expects its computing division to be the most affected by price increases in the coming quarters.
The scale of the problem gets into stark relief with Gartner’s forecast. CNBC reported that Gartner expects soaring memory costs to reduce global PC shipments by 10.4% and smartphone shipments by 8.4% in 2026. That is not a supply chain inconvenience. It is a contraction in how many devices the world can afford to buy.
Ranjit Atwal, a Gartner analyst, captured the situation when he spoke to CNBC about Apple specifically. “Even Apple can’t be safe,” he said, “as much as they have all the expertise and long-term planning, and everything else. This is beyond their capacity to limit the impact.”
Counterpoint Research estimates that higher memory costs could add roughly $200 per iPhone for Apple. If that flows through to consumer prices, the phone that has become the default device for hundreds of millions of people gets meaningfully more expensive heading into the holiday cycle.
Cook did not say when iPhone price increases would arrive. He did not have to. The Mac and iPad hikes announced June 25 made the direction clear enough.
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