Micron Technology executives are once again pointing fingers at Apple. According to Cailian Press, CEO Sanjay Mehrotra recently said that over the past few years, some customers have pushed memory makers to slash prices, and the fallout has been ugly. In 2023, Micron’s prices cratered to just one-third of their previous levels, leaving the company unable to invest in new production capacity.
Mehrotra revealed that certain customers drove memory industry pricing down so aggressively that it’s become a major reason for today’s widespread shortage. He expects the memory crunch to drag on until 2027 or even longer, because building new fabrication plants takes years, and next-generation memory manufacturing is only getting more complex.
He didn’t drop any names, but the thinly veiled jab is widely seen as aimed at Micron’s biggest customer, Apple. And this isn’t the first time Micron executives have sounded off like this recently.
Just last week, Micron’s Chief Commercial Officer Sumit Sadana said that some customers used their strong bargaining position to demand rock-bottom memory prices. At the time, Micron stressed that this kind of aggressive pricing wasn’t healthy — because when margins and pricing are both in the gutter, plenty of industry investment projects were put on hold in 2023.
On June 25, Apple officially announced price hikes across Mac, iPad, and home device lines, blaming the cost pressure from an unprecedented memory chip and storage shortage sparked by the rapid expansion of AI data centers.
The specific increases: MacBook Neo’s starting price jumped from $599 to $699, MacBook Air went from $1,099 to $1,299, the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro rose from $1,699 to $1,999, the 11-inch iPad Pro climbed from $999 to $1,199, and iPad Air went from $599 to $749. These are global price adjustments; iPhone prices haven’t changed yet.
An Apple spokesperson said that “the rapid expansion of AI data centers has triggered an extraordinary surge in memory and storage demand,” adding that the company has “never seen component prices rise so fast and so much.” Apple stressed that it had already tried hard to absorb the cost pressures for consumers, but “now we’ve reached the point where we have no choice but to start raising prices.”
That price hike erased a staggering $263 billion from Apple’s market value in a single day — the second-largest single-day drop in history.
The increase also drew fresh criticism from Micron executives. According to the National Business Daily, on June 27, a popular overseas financial influencer account claimed that Micron executives openly slammed Apple’s pricing model: for more than a decade, Apple has been buying storage chips at $5, slapping them into a simple package, and then selling the storage upgrade to consumers for $99 — all while mocking Micron for wanting to raise the price to $7 per chip.
Now that chip procurement prices have surged to $50, Apple is turning around and charging consumers an extra $250, passing the cost pressure onto users several times over.
Before Apple’s price move, nearly all major brands — including Samsung, OPPO, vivo, Huawei, and Honor — had already raised their product prices to varying degrees.
Apple, however, had been able to hold off thanks to its massive scale and long-term fixed-price agreements that let it stockpile a mountain of cheap chips. That was the real secret behind Apple’s ability to keep prices steady for so long. But starting in June, those low-cost inventories have pretty much run dry. Going forward, all new products and replenishment models will have to buy chips at market-high prices, which means hardware costs are basically doubling overnight.
Apple CEO Tim Cook already warned during the April earnings call: “After the June quarter, storage costs will have an increasingly significant impact on our business. We expect storage costs to rise meaningfully.”
The overseas memory chip industry is incredibly concentrated, with just three giants left standing. The DRAM memory used in Apple devices currently comes mainly from Micron Technology, South Korea’s Samsung, and SK Hynix.
Apple is reportedly looking to diversify its memory suppliers. On June 27, China News Service’s Jingwei cited media reports saying that six people familiar with the matter revealed that Apple is lobbying the U.S. government for approval to buy memory chips from the Chinese semiconductor company CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies), in an effort to ease the cost pressure from rising chip prices. If CXMT can be brought into the memory supply chain, it would give Apple some relief from being squeezed by upstream suppliers.
The report noted that in 2023 there was a global oversupply of memory, and DRAM prices collapsed. Terminal makers like Apple took full advantage, stocking up on huge amounts of cheap inventory. But the AI boom over the past three years has completely flipped the script for memory suppliers.
Starting in the second half of 2025, memory prices kicked off a rapid rally. At that point, memory fabs stopped producing legacy DRAM products like LPDDR4X and DDR4, shifting massive wafer capacity toward HBM (high-bandwidth memory) and DDR5 production instead. That left the supply of LPDDR and other DRAM used in smartphones in a tight squeeze.
Thanks to all this, Micron Technology delivered a quarterly report that blew past expectations. For the third quarter of fiscal 2026, Micron’s revenue hit $41.456 billion, a staggering 346% year-over-year surge. Net profit came in at $28.857 billion, up more than 12 times, and the gross margin hit a record 84.9%.
CXMT’s performance was just as impressive: in the first half of 2026, the company posted revenue of 110 billion to 120 billion yuan, a year-over-year increase of 612.53% to 677.31%, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 50 billion to 57 billion yuan, a jump of 2,244.03% to 2,544.19%.
As one of China’s twin stars in the memory sector, CXMT’s market share is steadily climbing. According to data from market research firm Omdia, based on DRAM sales in the second quarter of 2025, CXMT held a 3.97% global market share. By the fourth quarter of 2025, its DRAM market share had risen to 7.67%. In the first quarter of 2026, the share reached 8%, solidifying its position as the world’s fourth-largest player.
On June 12, the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s official website showed that CXMT’s IPO review status had changed to “registration effective.” The company’s IPO plans to raise 29.5 billion yuan, making it the second-largest IPO in the history of the STAR Market.
