Micron Suggests Apple Helped Cause Memory Price Crisis

Micron's chief business officer has hinted, without calling it out by name, that Apple's tough supplier negotiations contributed to the conditions behind the global memory shortage.

In remarks given to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Sumit Sadana explained that Micron was unable to fund capacity expansion during the industry's previous slump, a period when its margins turned negative partly because some buyers pushed relentlessly for lower prices.

We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing at that time that this is not constructive. A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins.

Micron is one of Apple's memory suppliers, providing some of the DRAM and NAND flash chips that go into iPhones, Macs, and iPads. Apple has a reputation for getting favorable terms from suppliers like Micron through long-term purchasing contracts.

Sadana's comments came just hours after Apple unveiled a sweeping round of price hikes that touched nearly every part of its hardware lineup. Products across the Mac, iPad, Apple TV, HomePod, and Vision Pro lines all went up in price, with only the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods left untouched. Apple's stock closed down 6% the same day, its worst single-day performance in more than a year, wiping out roughly $265 billion in market value.

Apple CEO Tim Cook forewarned about this outcome more than a week earlier in comments to the same publication, warning that price increases had become unavoidable given how the company was being squeezed on memory and storage costs. Cook said Apple had been trying to shield customers from the worst of it but had reached a breaking point, describing the shortage as a "hundred-year flood" unlike anything he had seen in more than four decades. He pointed to the surge in demand for high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers, arguing that consumer products were now competing for a shrinking pool of supply and that pricing needed to come back down to earth before Apple's own prices could follow.