The global memory shortage dominated tech earnings season this week, with Apple CEO Tim Cook warning that it is only the beginning.

“We believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business,” Cook said in the Q&A portion of his company’s earnings call on Thursday after repeatedly telling analysts that the company faced “supply constraints” in the latest quarter. “We’ll continue to evaluate this.”

Apple’s earnings report, which delivered an across-the-board beat and stronger-than-expected revenue guidance, followed Meta and Microsoft’s results a day earlier, where both companies said rising memory prices were driving higher capital expenditure forecasts for the year.

Projecting $190 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, up 61 per cent from last year, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on a conference call that about $25 billion of the increase would come from higher component costs.

Meta also said “expectations for higher component pricing” had pushed its capex forecast higher, from a ceiling of $135 billion to as much as $145 billion.

Across the tech industry, executives have increasingly warned about surging memory prices, driven by overwhelming demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Each new generation of Nvidia chips, central to the AI boom, incorporates more memory, further tightening supply in an already strained global market.

With AI chips and data centers absorbing a growing share of supply, memory for consumer devices such as PCs and smartphones is becoming increasingly scarce, and significantly more expensive as a result.