Apple's near-term margin problem was given a fresh airing by Nvidia, whose finance chief described the rise in memory chip prices as astronomical.
Colette Kress, speaking shortly after the chipmaker's second-quarter earnings call, said securing capacity no longer guaranteed knowing how many chips would arrive, or at what price.
Apple shares fell more than 1% in response and are down about 6% over the past month.
A constraint already flagged
The iPhone maker issued cautious revenue guidance for the current quarter in late July, citing an inability to source enough memory to meet demand.
Margins in the June quarter also came under pressure from higher memory costs.
Tim Cook, who hands over as chief executive to John Ternus on 1 September, told analysts the company had reluctantly raised prices on some products.
He characterised the market as a 100-year flood in memory pricing, with exponential increases, and does not expect the pressure to ease soon.
Why prices are climbing
The squeeze stems from demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the components that feed AI servers.
Supply has not kept pace with the rate of data centre construction.
SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron have largely sold out premium AI memory capacity for much of 2026, with Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta taking early allocations.
That has handed suppliers pricing power after several years of weak trading conditions, and supply is expected to stay tight into 2027.
The read-across for consumer devices
Samik Chatterjee, an analyst at JP Morgan, wrote that supply constraints were worsening into the September quarter from the June quarter, concentrated in access to leading-edge processors.
He added that the margin impact from memory was escalating despite price increases already taken across products including Macs and iPads.
Nvidia is feeling the same pressure, guiding its own gross margin down to 74% in the current quarter from 75%.
Apple's September-quarter results, and any fresh commentary from suppliers on capacity, will determine whether the squeeze is a passing problem or a multi-quarter constraint.
