Memory Stick Prices Refuse To Come Back To Earth
Apple CEO Tim Cook's warning during Thursday earnings call about the deepening global memory shortage sent us back to review memory stick prices.
Let's review what Cook said…
# THE TAKE Cook's shortage theater masks a decade-old cartel structure. pricing hasn't "refused to come down"—it's been artificially maintained through a three-player oligopoly: SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron. These aren't market forces. They're coordination points. The technical reality: NAND flash production scaled exponentially. Capacity expanded 40% annually since 2015. Yet prices stabilized at 2021 peaks. That's not physics. That's collusion dressed in supply-chain language. Apple benefits directly. Premium margins on storage tiers ($200 for 256GB? Criminal) require artificial scarcity. Cook's "warning" signals retailers and investors to accept inflated pricing as inevitable rather than engineered. The shortage ends when it profits manufacturers to end it. Until then, expect continued fiction dressed as crisis.
What the Documents Show
Both Meta and Microsoft noted in their own earnings results this week that elevated memory prices are directly driving their expenditures higher. This convergence of warnings from three of the world's most powerful tech companies signals an industry-wide crisis that extends far beyond quarterly earnings reports. The price trajectory reveals the severity of what's unfolding. According to Goldman Sachs analyst Kenta Kinuhata's cost breakdown, DRAM price increase estimates for 2026 have jumped from 150 percent to 280 percent in recent months. NAND follows a similar trajectory, with estimates escalating from 100 percent to 250 percent.
Follow the Money
More troubling still, supply tightness is now expected to persist through late 2026 and into 2027—meaning this isn't a temporary blip but a structural problem. Real-world pricing confirms the analysis. Amazon's price-tracking data shows G.SKILL Trident Z5 RGB Series DDR5 RAM selling for around $869 at the end of April, up from just $149 in early September—a 483 percent increase in months. The root cause lies in how artificial intelligence has upended memory markets. Memory makers Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix are racing to add new capacity, but AI data centers are absorbing an ever-larger share of available supply. Those chips that once flowed to consumer PCs and smartphones are now being redirected toward training massive language models and serving corporate AI infrastructure.
What Else We Know
The mainstream tech press frames this as inevitable progress, the natural cost of innovation. It notably underplays the reality that Big Tech deliberately engineered this shortage by committing enormous capital to AI infrastructure before securing adequate memory supplies—essentially bidding up prices for everyone else in the process. The ordinary implications are profound. Consumer electronics—the laptops, desktops, and gaming rigs that regular people actually use—have become collateral damage in a supply war waged by trillion-dollar corporations chasing artificial intelligence dominance. Building a trading desktop or upgrading a workstation has become prohibitively expensive. The question now isn't when memory becomes affordable again, but whether ordinary consumers and small businesses will be priced out of the market entirely before supply finally catches up.
Primary Sources
- Source: ZeroHedge
- Category: Tech & Privacy
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
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