Apple warns memory prices are 'unprecedented' as chip costs hit Macs, servers and Huawei

Apple's record Mac year meets a memory bill

Apple sold more Macs in fiscal 2026 than in any previous year, CEO John Ternus said on the earnings call.

Memory is the component that sets the floor price on phones, laptops and servers. A sustained rise reaches buyers as higher stickers or longer waits. Apple has already raised prices on Macs and iPads in June and on iPhones in September. It now expects constraints on Mac and iPad in the December quarter. The main driver is memory, according to COO Sabih Khan. Nobody has said publicly when the crunch eases.

Mac revenue was $10.8 billion in the September quarter, up 24% year on year. That followed $10.35 billion in the June quarter, up nearly 29%. "What we're seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented," Ternus told analysts. He added that Apple expects even higher memory costs in the December quarter and beyond. The cost already shows in the margin. Gross margin fell about one percentage point between the June and September quarters, excluding tariff effects. Memory costs caused the entire drop, CFO Kevan Parekh said.

Gross margin was 47.9% in the September quarter. Apple guides it to 45% to 46% for December.

Manufacturing purchase obligations rose $33 billion between June and September. That is a sign of how hard Apple is bidding to secure supply.

The shortage has a black market

Huawei tells some customers to source their own AI chip memory, The Information reported. That effectively pushes buyers onto the black market.

Huawei's Chinese suppliers cannot produce enough high-bandwidth memory. US export rules block direct purchases from Samsung and SK Hynix, which control over 80% of the global market. Smugglers bundle HBM with cheap server processors that fall below the export threshold. They ship the packages through Hong Kong and separate the parts there. The process is fragile and error rates are high. Prices for smuggled HBM3E have jumped from a few hundred dollars to around $4,000 per unit in just a year, according to a broker in Shenzhen cited by The Decoder. Each AI chip needs six to eight units, so memory alone can cost up to $32,000.

South Korea's customs authority had uncovered trade violations worth $560 million by May. That was already above the previous full-year record. A third of that involved strategic goods such as chips.

Server buyers pay more for less

The price pressure reaches beyond consumer gadgets. Hyperion Research found spending on on-prem HPC and AI for science systems reached $16.5 billion in the first half of 2026. That compares with $13.8 billion a year earlier, a 19.9% increase. Unit deliveries rose only 4.4%, while server node volume grew 14.1%. Hyperion read that as component and system price hikes.

Hyperion CEO Earl Joseph framed the demand plainly. "Organizations and institutions are continuing to invest in their advanced computing infrastructure due to both replacing aging machines and the desire to adopt AI into their workflows," he said in a press release.

Dell now leads on-prem HPC and AI4S sales with a 24% share on $4.2 billion. HPE slipped to 21%. It had held the top spot for 25 years.

What happens next

Apple's December quarter guidance of 45% to 46% gross margin is the nearest dated checkpoint. The guidance comes with expected Mac and iPad constraints. Memory is driving those constraints.

Huawei's Ascend 960DT is due to launch early next year.