A growing procession of tech industry leaders including Elon Musk and Tim Cook are warning about a global crisis in the making: A shortage of memory chips is beginning to hammer profits, derail corporate plans and inflate price tags on everything from laptops and smartphones to automobiles and data centers — and the crunch is only going to get worse.
Since the start of 2026, Tesla Inc., Apple Inc. and a dozen other major corporations have signaled that the shortage of DRAM, or dynamic random access memory — the fundamental building block of almost all technology — will constrain production. Cook warned it will compress iPhone margins. Micron Technology Inc. called the bottleneck “unprecedented.” Musk got to the intractable nature of the problem when he declared Tesla is going to have to build its own memory fabrication plant.
