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2026-02-16 09:23:17
[Musk and Cook Warn of Global Memory Chip Shortage] Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and other tech leaders have recently issued warnings that a global crisis triggered by a memory chip shortage is brewing, impacting corporate profits, disrupting plans, and driving up prices for everything from laptops and smartphones to cars and data centers. The supply shortage is only expected to worsen. Since the beginning of this year, more than a dozen large companies, including Tesla and Apple, have hinted at a severe shortage of DRAM, a memory chip used in almost all tech products, which will inevitably constrain production. Cook stated that this will compress iPhone profit margins. Micron Technology described the shortage as "unprecedented." Musk even stated that Tesla will have to build its own chip factory, saying, "If we don't build a chip factory, we will encounter a chip bottleneck." The root cause of this memory chip supply shortage lies in the construction boom of AI data centers. Because Nvidia's AI chips require large amounts of high-bandwidth memory, the available capacity of the memory chip industry has been squeezed, leading to a severe shortage of memory chips used in traditional fields such as mobile phones and personal computers. Bernstein semiconductor industry analyst Mark Li warned that memory prices are experiencing a "parabolic" rise. While this will bring huge profits to Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, other sectors of the electronics industry will pay a heavy price in the coming months.
