On 18 June, current Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that price increases were “inevitable”. According to Cook, Apple had done everything it could to shield customers from soaring component costs, but the situation had become “unsustainable.” The culprit, he said, was the AI gold rush. As the AI industry has exploded, data centers have been gulping down memory and storage. Hardware makers have found themselves squeezed – even behemoths like Apple.