Apple shares fell sharply Thursday after the tech giant raised prices on a number of its signature products to make up for what it said were skyrocketing memory prices resulting from the AI boom.Limited time: Save 25% on NBC News subscriptionGet exclusive reporting, live Q&As and ad-free reading.As of 2:00 p.m.ET, Apple stock was down by nearly 6%, putting the company on track for its worst one-day performance in more than a year, and wiping out about $250 billion worth of market value.The company had announced that prices for its MacBook Neo, MacBook Air, iMac, and iPad product lines would all rise, in some cases by as much as $200.
The prices of the iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods were not impacted.“The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage,” the company told NBC News in a statement.“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly.”The company said it had “shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac.”Apple said it was “working tirelessly to find solutions.” The price increases took effect immediately and were already listed at Apple’s online store at midday on Thursday.Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal that “price increases are unavoidable” given the memory crunch.
“We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us,” Cook told the paper.Apple is far from the only tech giant under pressure from the rising cost of chips capable of storing all the data required to operate today’s cutting edge consumer products.Microsoft’s Xbox division said Thursday it was raising prices by $100 for some models and $150 for higher-memory capacity models.“Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another ...