Apple Just Raised Mac and iPad Prices 20%, So Who Is Getting Rich Off the Shortage?

Micron (MU) surged 666% over twelve months as the AI memory shortage forcing Apple (AAPL) to raise Mac prices 20% expanded Micron's gross margins to 85%.

Micron locked in roughly $100 billion in take-or-pay contracts and expects tight memory supply to persist beyond 2027, keeping Apple's costs structurally elevated.

Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Apple didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today .

On Tim Cook's last day as chief executive of Apple, CNBC's MacKenzie Sigalos reported Mac and iPad prices are already up 20%, and the company is signaling that iPhone increases are next. The reason, in Cook's own words from the July earnings call, is a "100-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices." Apple's September 9 launch event is days away, with a foldable iPhone expected to debut at Apple Park on September 4 during John Ternus's first week in the top job.

So who is getting rich off the shortage that just made a MacBook cost hundreds of dollars more? Look one link up the supply chain, at the memory suppliers.

Micron Technology ( NASDAQ:MU ), the only U.S.-based memory maker, has become the clearest financial beneficiary of the AI-driven DRAM squeeze now showing up on Apple's price tags. Shares closed at $932.86 on August 28 and traded near $940 on Monday, leaving the stock up 227% year to date and 666% over the past twelve months. Apple ( NASDAQ:AAPL ), by contrast, is up 17.9% year to date and down 5.4% over the past month, closing Monday near $315. One company is passing costs through. The other is collecting them.

Micron's June-quarter results show the mechanics. Revenue reached $41.46 billion, up 345.7% from a year earlier, with GAAP gross margin expanding to 84.6% from 37.7%. DRAM prices rose in the low 60s percentage range sequentially; NAND prices rose in the mid-80s. Guidance for the current quarter calls for revenue of $50 billion, plus or minus $1 billion, at roughly 86% gross margin. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra told analysts the tightness is structural: "We expect tight conditions to persist beyond calendar 2027 as a result of AI-driven demand across all segments coupled with structural supply constraints."

To lock that in, Micron has signed 16 Strategic Customer Agreements, mostly five-year take-or-pay contracts covering roughly 20% of DRAM and a third of NAND volume, with minimum committed revenue of about $100 billion and $22 billion in customer cash deposits and letters of credit. Mehrotra told UBS that "at the floor price that our profitability levels at the gross margins and the floor prices are higher than peak margins at any time in the past." A 666% twelve-month run on a memory maker is the kind of setup we reverse-engineered from past monster tech winners in a free playbook you can grab here.