Apple CEO Tim Cook has spent more than 40 years navigating the technology supply chain. But in a Wall Street Journal interview on June 17, he said he’s never seen anything like what’s happening to memory chip prices right now.
Cook described the current surge as a “hundred-year flood,” the kind of phrase you reserve for situations that make veterans of an industry pause and recalibrate their assumptions entirely.
The numbers behind the flood
Memory and storage chip prices have quadrupled since 2025. In a recent quarter alone, DRAM prices climbed as much as 40%.
Memory chips are in virtually everything Apple sells. iPhones, MacBooks, iPads, the works. When those components spike in cost, the math on every product line changes fast.
