Apple is beginning to feel the downstream effects of the AI infrastructure boom, with surging demand for data center hardware pushing up component costs and weakening the leverage it has long exercised over its suppliers. Meanwhile, foundry capacity and packaging are increasingly being pulled toward AI accelerators instead of consumer products. Now, WSJ reports is facing a big squeeze, and is even considering suppliers other than TSMC for its lower-end processors.
During the company’s most recent earnings call on January 29, CEO Tim Cook acknowledged that the company was seeing constraints in its chip supplies and that memory costs were rising significantly. Over the past few months, we’ve seen an unusually aggressive upswing in DRAM and NAND pricing, with new estimates from TrendForce suggesting that contract prices for standard DRAM will climb by more than 90% quarter-over-quarter in the January to March period of 2026, up from an earlier estimate of 55-60%. NAND itself is up by more than 30%, driven by suppliers prioritizing high-margin server parts and long-term commitments tied to AI infrastructure.
