Apple signals price hikes amid rising memory chip costs

US-based tech giant Apple may raise prices across some of its products as surging memory and storage chip costs due to an increase in demand from artificial intelligence (AI) data centres continue to put pressure on the company's margins, according to a report.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company can no longer fully absorb the sharp increase in component costs and may eventually pass some of the burden on to consumers. "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," Cook was quoted as saying. "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." The comments come amid growing concerns over the impact of AI-driven demand on global semiconductor supply chains. Industry groups representing automakers, retailers and electronics manufacturers have warned that rising demand for memory chips could lead to higher consumer prices and supply disruptions.However, Cook did not specify when the price increases could take effect, how large they would be or which Apple products would be affected. According to the report, memory and storage components have emerged as key concerns for the iPhone maker, particularly the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) market, where supplies have tightened as chipmakers allocate more production capacity to high-bandwidth memory used in AI servers. Cook said increasing volumes of memory supply are being directed towards AI infrastructure, reducing availability for consumer electronics.