Apple is planning to raise prices on some of its products as the company faces rising costs for memory and storage chips driven by growing demand from the artificial intelligence sector, CEO Tim Cook has said.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Cook said rising demand for AI data centres has intensified competition for memory and storage components, leading to higher costs across the technology industry.
“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.”
Cook did not specify when any price increases would take effect, how much prices could rise, or which products would be affected.
He noted that Apple is particularly concerned about rising DRAM memory costs, as more supply is being diverted to high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers.
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook said. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products.”
Cook also indicated that Apple is willing to use its financial resources to help increase memory supply, although he ruled out building the company’s own memory and storage manufacturing facilities. (Newswire)