Memory squeeze reaches Apple as HBM smuggling routes run through Asia

The warning came with the company's fiscal fourth quarter results, reported on 2 November. Ternus said Apple had partly offset the increases with price rises on Macs and iPads at the end of June and on iPhones in September, according to TechCrunch's account of the earnings call. He also said Apple expects memory costs to keep climbing beyond December.

The balance sheet shows the stockpiling. Apple's inventory grew from $11.09 billion in the third quarter to $14.54 billion in the fourth, a 31.1% rise, and was up 154.3% year on year from $5.72 billion, TechCrunch reported. Manufacturing purchase obligations rose by $33 billion between June and the September quarter, Ternus said.

Apple's forecast of a 45% to 46% gross margin for the December quarter was largely put down to memory costs. The September quarter came in at 47.9%.

Seoul to Shenzhen, via Hong Kong

The shortage has a second front. Tom's Hardware reported on 3 November that a smuggler is moving export-controlled HBM out of South Korea into China. The method pairs the memory with cheap, low-performance server processors that sit below the export thresholds. Export rules look at the processor's performance, not at what is attached to it. So the packages clear controls, and the memory is later stripped out in Shenzhen workshops.

The economics explain the risk. According to The Decoder, which cites The Information, black market HBM3E has gone from a few hundred dollars to around $4,000 per unit in a year. Each AI chip needs six to eight units, putting memory alone at up to $32,000 per chip. A Shenzhen broker gave that figure. South Korea's customs authority had logged trade violations worth $560 million by May, already past the previous full-year record, The Decoder reported. A third of those involved strategic goods such as chips.

Huawei is telling some customers to source the memory for its AI chips themselves, effectively pushing buyers onto the black market, according to The Information.

The Decoder reports that Huawei plans to launch the Ascend 960DT early next year and says it will double the performance of its current chips. Samsung and SK hynix together control more than 80% of the global HBM market, which is why the routing matters.

What the suppliers say

The pressure is not expected to ease soon. Semiconductor Engineering's week in review, published on 30 October, reported that SK hynix expects memory supply constraints to persist through 2030. DRAM and HBM volumes are effectively sold out through 2029. Samsung expects tight supply through 2028 and says its 2027 HBM output is already sold out. The same roundup noted that Anthropic warned in its IPO filing that HBM shortages and limited TSMC capacity could constrain AI expansion. TSMC is reportedly weighing a 20% price increase for CoWoS packaging.

China's answer is being built at home, and it is not yet convincing. CXMT plans to begin limited production of HBM3E despite yields of just 20% to 30%, Reuters reported via the same roundup. The South China Morning Post reported on 2 November that CXMT is defending a bet on a new DRAM architecture as a way around US curbs.

Japan sits on the supply side of this trade and is being pulled in two directions. Samsung's chairman visited a Japanese packaging research site this week, according to Businesskorea, as reported in the context list. Japan has also committed $21 billion to US chip factories under a trade deal, a figure carried by multiple outlets in the same list. Neither report names the manufacturers, so treat both as reported, not settled.

Back in Europe, Bosch said on 3 November that it will move its semiconductor business into a dedicated division from January 2028. It targets around €5 billion in annual chip sales by 2030, The Next Web reported. The unit stays inside Bosch. The company plans to open its fabs to outside customers and is spending around $2 billion converting its Roseville, California site to silicon carbide.

Apple's answer, for now, is to buy more and charge more. Whether that holds depends on how fast the memory makers can add capacity, and on how much of the gap gets filled by containers coming through Hong Kong.