Following Apple CEO Tim Cook's depiction of the wildly fluctuating memory prices as a "100-year flood," Tesla CEO Elon Musk also voiced a similar opinion, asserting that the current global surge in memory prices is unprecedented. In the first half of 2026, memory chip prices have witnessed astonishing hikes, with DRAM and NAND Flash contract prices climbing significantly on a month-on-month basis. Some products have even surged by over 600%. The escalating demand for AI computing power has driven servers to require far more memory than traditional servers, leading to a constrained supply of memory chips for consumer electronics. Manufacturers like Apple have already increased product prices to mitigate cost pressures.
