Elon Musk agrees with Tim Cook: The memory shortage is unprecedented

Elon Musk said soaring memory costs are unlike anything he has seen, echoing a warning Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook issued last quarter. The Tesla CEO posted on X that the memory shortage is unprecedented, a remark that lands as semiconductor manufacturers wrestle with a structural shift in production capacity.

Memory prices have climbed for four consecutive quarters. The driver is demand for high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, used to string multiple GPU dies together in AI training clusters. HBM consumes roughly the same silicon area as twice the traditional DRAM, crimping supply of the standard memory chips that go into smartphones and laptops. Cook said on Apple's earnings call that memory costs had forced the company to adjust gross margin expectations.

The squeeze hits sectors differently. For Apple and other consumer hardware makers, higher DRAM and NAND prices directly increase bill-of-materials costs. For Tesla and other automakers, the pinch is in microcontroller and infotainment chips that still rely on trailing-edge memory nodes. For the AI industry, the bottleneck is reversed: HBM supply is insufficient to meet demand from hyperscalers, pushing lead times past 20 weeks for some SK Hynix and Samsung products.

The simple read is that memory shortages are a cyclical pricing event. The better market read points to a structural realignment. Foundries are allocating wafer starts toward HBM and high-margin logic, shrinking the base of memory available for non-AI applications. That dynamic has not existed in the memory market since the PC boom flattened in the mid-2010s. The question for investors is whether this shift is a multiyear capacity rebalancing or the kind of inventory surge that eventually corrects when demand softens.

Musk did not specify whether Tesla's vehicle cost structure had absorbed a material memory price increase. The company's auto margins have been under pressure from discounting and an aging model lineup. A sustained memory cost headwind would make a margin recovery harder.

The next earnings data point comes from Micron Technology, the largest U.S. memory maker, which reports toward the end of the fiscal quarter. Analysts will watch whether its HBM revenue split crosses the threshold that makes non-HBM memory a shrinking revenue line.

Musk's post on X: 'Never seen anything like it.' The same market, two different supply chains, one bottleneck.