Your next iPhone is going to be more expensive than the last one you bought.
Same thing for your next Xbox.
And it could well be true for your next PC, or TV — or just about anything else with electronics inside it.
Blame AI.
That’s the messaging we’re getting from the C-suites across the country: A steady drumbeat of company leaders saying that the AI boom means that chips and other components they need for their products are getting snapped up by AI companies. That means their costs are going up, and they’re going to pass those rising costs along to consumers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook made headlines this week when he previewed coming price hikes for iPhones in The Wall Street Journal. He said the price increases were “unavoidable” because the chips Apple needs for memory and storage are being hoovered up by Big Tech companies spending billions on their AI buildouts.
Cook is the most high-profile CEO sounding the alarm about AI price hikes, but he’s not the only one.
A couple of weeks ago, Asha Sharma, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox unit, said her business was in a “hardware component crisis” because of skyrocketing storage costs.
In February of this year, “the price we paid for console storage components was over 2x as high as we paid last fall,” she explained in an open letter. “These costs have since doubled again. And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier.”
Her business is seeing the same pattern when it comes to memory costs, Sharma said.
These warnings have been coming for a while. In December of last year, Dell said it would hike its prices because of AI-related price hikes. Ford — yes, your car is a computer on wheels now — said it was worried about the same thing in February.
And they are coming from many corners of the economy. Earlier in June, a coalition of trade groups — including retailers, media companies, and the medical supply industry — told White House officials that “an urgent imbalance in the market for memory chips … could lead to significant and sustained near-term price increases for American households.”
What is all of that going to mean for you, a person who buys things? We don’t fully know yet.
Apple, for instance, won’t roll out a new iPhone until the fall, so we won’t be able to make a real comparison until then — and even when we do, we won’t be comparing (forgive me) apples to apples, since the newest iPhone will have features that aren’t on older models.
It’s also going to be difficult to assess the AI impact on bigger-ticket items: It’s very likely that the price of your next car will have more to do with Donald Trump’s tariff policies than the price of DRAM chips.
And I also understand if you’re a skeptical sort who thinks CEOs blaming higher prices on chip costs may have other motivations than truth-telling — the same way some people believe that AI-related job cuts aren’t really about AI at all.
But there is plenty of evidence that the cost of AI-related chips is indeed going up, up up — all driven by the boom in AI data centers. Something to think about the next time you ask a chatbot for help.
