Apple calls memory prices unprecedented as DRAM revenue nears $200bn a quarter

Apple reported record September-quarter revenue of $114.5bn on 2 November and told investors that memory costs would weigh on its margins. Its release put revenue up 12% on a year earlier, with a gross margin of 47.9% that included a benefit of about one percentage point from tariff refunds. The release did not mention memory. The detail came from the earnings call and the annual filing.

According to The Next Web’s account of the call, chief executive John Ternus said “what we’re seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented” and that pricing for memory purchases would keep rising beyond the December quarter. Apple guided that quarter’s gross margin to 45% to 46%, below the 46.3% analysts had expected, according to the same report, and chief financial officer Kevan Parekh blamed memory costs and the cloud costs of Siri’s AI features. Inventory stood at $14.54bn against $5.72bn a year earlier, the report said.

Apple’s annual filing said it was “experiencing supply constraints and rising costs driven by industry-wide supply-demand imbalances for key components, including advanced semiconductors, memory and storage,” and expected the trends to intensify for memory and storage. It reported manufacturing purchase obligations of $89.7bn as of 26 September, $82.7bn of it payable within 12 months. The Next Web said that was $33bn higher than in June. The passages quoted do not name AI as the cause; Counterpoint’s analysis, below, does.

Counterpoint Research supplied the market-wide link. In its third-quarter memory tracker, published on 5 November, it put DRAM revenue at “nearly $200 billion”, up 369% on a year earlier. Bit shipments rose only about 4%; the growth came from prices, with average selling prices at $1.9 per gigabit. Counterpoint attributed demand to agentic AI workloads. HBM, the stacked memory used with AI accelerators, nearly doubled its revenue but fell as a share of the total because conventional DDR (up about 500%) and LPDDR (up nearly 400%) grew faster. Samsung held 38% of DRAM revenue, and SK hynix grew revenue by more than 40% on the quarter. Counterpoint expected supply to stay tight because major new fabrication plants would not begin production until 2028.

The figures extend the record profits at Samsung and SK hynix reported the week before, and show the cost reaching device makers.