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The Chip-pocalypse Comes For Apple
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Tim Cook warned Apple price hikes are unavoidable as AI gobbles up memory chips. Noam Shazeer bolted from Google to OpenAI. Midjourney unveiled a bizarre full-body ultrasound scanner, and businesses piled into Kalshi to hedge real-world risk.
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Welcome to the tech we write home for Thursday, June 18, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Tim Cook warned Apple price hikes are unavoidable as AI gobbles up memory chips Noam Shazir bolted From Google to OpenAI MidJourney unveiled a bizarre full body ultrasound scanner and businesses are piling into Kalshi to hedge real world risk. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Think you have to build your own search engine scraping infrastructure? Think again, folks. SERP API can take care of all your search engine scraping needs. It lets AI products access real time web search data programmatically, no scraping infrastructure required. Their APIs offer structured JSON data from all the top search engines, including Google, Amazon and YouTube. Top tech companies already use SERP API to power their AI agents, their market intelligence tools, and their automated research workflows. See how it can help you and your team. Serp API provides 250 free searches per month. Go check it out@serpapi.com that's Serp serpapi.com In an interview, Tim Cook dropped the news that Apple price hikes are, in his words, unavoidable to offset surging memory and storage chip costs. Quick quoting the Journal. Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable, he said. We're doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we've been trying to shield our customers from the increases. But the situation has become unsustainable. Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected. Apple's next major product launch is likely to be in September when It releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone. Price increases, especially for Macs and iPads, could come sooner. Apple raised the starting price of the Mac Mini last month. In between launch events, skyrocketing demand for memory and storage chips from artificial intelligence companies has pushed up their costs so much that Apple would have to raise device prices substantially to maintain its profit margins. Passing the higher costs on to consumers while maintaining its profit margin would add about $270 to the price of the next iPhone pro model estimates research firm Tech Insights. Chips for memory and storage are key components inside most computing devices, including smartphones, laptops, game consoles, medical equipment and even cars. But now AI servers are gobbling up rapidly increasing volumes of those chips, so even a company as rich and powerful as Apple is struggling to secure supply. Memory, also called DRAM, and storage, also called NAND, are like elements of a mid 20th century office. The memory is a desk that holds all the papers a worker needs to perform a task, while storage is the filing cabinet that holds everything else. Smartphones use DRAM memory to run apps currently in use, and they use NAND storage to file away photos and videos, for example. Cook said prices for memory and storage are both issues for the company, though he focused on the DRAM market in particular, calling out the increased allocations going to so called high bandwidth memory that is used for AI servers. There's less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases, said Cook. We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That's the bottom line. Three companies dominate the market for DRAM memory Samsung and SK, Hynix in South Korea and Micron in the U.S. makers of NAND storage include those three companies as well as Shosha and Sandisk. Their stock prices, along with their profits, have exploded over the past 12 months, Micron and Skhenix shares have risen more than 800%, while Shosha Sandisk have risen 4,600%. Memory companies are building more factories. Morgan Stanley forecasts that production capacity for DRAM wafers, the silicon disks on which chips are patterned, will grow 30% by 2027. Yet as suppliers prioritize, the specialized AI memory, wafers for consumer tech will fall up to 15% short of demand, Morgan Stanley estimates China has national champion companies in memory and storage, but due to national security rules, American companies would likely requ licenses to work with them. When asked if those restrictions should be loosened, Cook said, I think everything needs to be on the table, adding, I think we should look at all supply. In the interview, Cook said Apple stands ready to use its cash reserves to boost memory supply. We're willing to use our balance sheet to help be a part of the solution, he said. Obviously more capacity is needed. But Cook declined to offer specifics. It is unclear how Apple could match, let alone beat, the deal terms that AI hyperscalers are offering to lock up supply. Those companies are signing three to five year agreements with huge cash prepayments that Apple is unlikely unwilling to be able to match given its long history of disciplined spending. Cook said Apple wouldn't use its cache and silicon expertise to build its own memory and storage factories either. We can't do everything, said Cook. We know what we're good at. End quote. AI researcher Noam Shazir has left Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research. He rejoined joined Google as a Gemini co lead in 2024 during the $2.7 billion character AI deal. Quoting the information, he then became a tech lead on Gemini, Google's core AI model, and made key contributions to the initial development of new generations of the model known as pre training. Shazir's hiring is a major win for OpenAI in the AI talent wars, as OpenAI competes to catch up with arch rival Anthropic's most advanced models ahead of the two companies hotly anticipated initial public offerings. Shahzir was a key author of the original paper on Transformers, which essentially predict the most likely next word in a phrase and is the architecture that OpenAI used to underpin its GPT models. OpenAI used transformers to pioneer the chatbot field with ChatGPT, a type of product Shazir had hoped to launch at Google years earlier. In recent years, though, Google has narrowed the competitive gap with its Gemini chatbot, which has close ties to its dominant web search engine. At OpenAI, Shazir will focus on looking for new architectures for AI models, models and evolving the transformer architecture, OpenAI told employees. Jazeer confirmed his move on X. I'm excited to share that I'll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there, he wrote. In a statement, A Google spokesperson said, we are grateful for GNOME's meaningful contributions to Google over the years and we wish him well. Shazir's career has not been without controversy. Shahzir's startup, Character AI agreed to settle multiple lawsuits earlier this year after families alleged that character characters chatbots contributed to teen suicides and mental health crises. I think basically if this is the dude that Google essentially paid $2.7 billion to acquihire back a couple years ago and OpenAI needs someone to lead pre training as their turnaround. This is about OpenAI signaling number one that it isn't just bleeding talent to Anthropic anymore, but also it's probably about kneecapping Gemini development to a certain degree as well. Remember midjourney early in the AI frenzy. They were the viral hit for their AI image generation and then they've basically not done much. Well, they've done something and it's a bit out of left field. Quoting the Verge, Midjourney CEO David Holtz just showed off the company's first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the cat pictures produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed the Midjourney Scanner, it's an ultrasound based full body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscle, fat, bone and organs. To start, Holt said, ideally you could do this once a year or every single day as it aims for image quality comparable to MRI in some ways. He mentioned that one way he'd like to use it would be to see how his body changes in response to diet and workout changes, saying, I'm not the most measured man on earth yet, you know, but maybe I want to have that daily Measurable information A set of job listings advertises the company's goal as trying to build and launch the world's first full body ultrasound CT scanner, ultimately bringing safe, fast and highly fidelity preventative scanning to billions via a magical spa experience. The scanning process starts with stepping onto a platform that drops down into the water on rails through a ring of thousands of transducers that create ultrasonic waves. It then records the ripples passing through your body to analyze them and create detailed 3D images. The scan takes about 60 seconds, Holtz said. About a dozen people have been scanned so far. Here's how Midjourney describes it. It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin. Using its echolocation, the sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves and enough angles, we form an image of what's happening inside your body. It combines those sensors with two petaflops of processing power. But after watching the livestreamed reveal, I'm still unclear on what Midjourney's AI image generation tech exactly has to do with the midjourney medical effort. Beyond an alternative business for otherwise unused AI compute, Holtz hopes to put 10 of the scanners into a Midjourney spa location in San Francisco's Union Square that will open before the end of 2027 and offer to scan the hands of attendees at its launch. Eventually, the midjourney spa will have a gym saunas and cold plunges to go along with the hot tub equipped scanning rooms where visitors will get into the water to be scanned. He did mention that various medical applications would require FDA clearances, but for now, Midjourney Medical says it's working on body composition maps that don't require the same level of clearance as diagnostic imaging. It also says the library of scans users create can be shared with doctors, AI, health tools or others, and that we take data privacy seriously. More details on our data policies will come as we get closer to launch. Holt suggested that eventually these scans could become better than an MRI without radiation, powerful magnets or other complicating factors to get a look at what's going on inside people's bodies real fast. In response to a question, he imagined a future where the FDA had a class of devices to look at weird things and allowed people to just try to get as much data as we can. End quote. When inspiration strikes, you're usually not sitting at your desk ready to take notes. And honestly, some ideas are easier to say out loud than to type into your phone. 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Finally today, the Times says businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge business risks. Kalshi says institutional trading volume on its platform has grown 800% since November. Most people use prediction markets like Kalshi for the kinds of wagers that have made the companies famous speculating on political races, NBA final games, Taylor Swift's marriage plans. But businesses, including major Wall street firms, are betting that prediction markets can be used for so much more. Small businesses, including a New York City beer bar and a specialist sports insurer, have already used Kalshi for hedging their business risks. But the platform has spent months hiring trading specialists and working with financial firms to lay the groundwork for institutions to do that, too. The stakes are high. Kalshi has already become the biggest prediction market in the United States, producing $17.9 billion in trading volume last month alone, largely from individual bettors. And it raised 1 billion dol month at a staggering $22 billion valuation, double its appraised amount in December, on the premise that it could supercharge its growth by drawing in hedge funds, brokerages and more. Polymarket, its chief rival, sold a stake to the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange with a similar aim. I think there's a new Wall street being formed, tarek Mansour, a founder and the chief executive of Kalshi, said in a recent interview. A cornerstone of that bet is building up a way for companies to hedge their risks, a vital business operation normally done in the huge, if usually opaque, global derivatives market. Small businesses have started using prediction markets that way ahead of Game 1 of the NBA Finals this month, the Jeffrey, a New York City bar, said it would comp many of its customers tabs that evening if the Knicks won. As a hedge, it bet $5,000 on a Knicks victory, which netted the bar just under $8,000, helping pay for $9,500 worth of patrons tabs that evening. The Kalshi hedge worked like a charm. Andrew Friedman, a corporate lawyer who owns the Jefferies, said Kalshee itself had suggested the hedge to Mr. Friedman this year. GamePoint Capital, an insurance company that helps college athletics departments, sports teams and sponsors manage the financial risks of performance incentives in athletes and coaches. Contracts began hedging through Kalshi as well. Here's how it works, say GamePoint Capital agreed to insure against a golfer's winning the US Open and qualifying for a $1 million bonus. It would bet on Kalshi that the golfer would win, offsetting its financial risk. Historically, Game Point Capital used specialized insurance providers arranged through markets like Lloyds of London to buy protection. Will Hall, a founder and the chief executive of Game Point Capital, said his firm now arrange millions of dollars worth of hedges through Kalshi, which he has found is often cheaper and more flexible to arrange. Major trading firms have been working with Kalshi in hopes of making that kind of trading even more commonplace. Among them is Susquehanna International Group, the giant trading firm that in 2024 became Kalshi's first official market maker and has been evangelizing prediction markets potential ever since. It could end up being one of the largest businesses that comes out of prediction markets, jeremy Malitz, Susquehanna head of Macro trading and prediction markets, said in an interview. In April, Kalshit completed its first block trade, a securities transaction negotiated between two institutions off the public platform. Greenlight Commodities brokered the deal, involving a contract tied to carbon allowances on behalf of a hedge fund. Jump Trading Group, a big trading firm, took the other side of the trade. Executives at market makers say hedging on prediction markets would probably fall into several buckets. One that is likely to see high interest is helping companies hedge against political risks. It is a more precise way to hedge the exposure of certain outcomes of things like elections, said Josh Barkhorter, the head of sales at Falcon X, a prime brokerage for digital markets. But perhaps more intriguing is hedging against specific business risks. One trading executive raised the possibility of a company's wanting to hedge its exposure to DRAM memory chip prices or shipping prices. Long standing concern is whether prediction markets have enough liquidity to support such robust trading, Kalshi argues. That problem is being addressed with institutional trading volume on its platform having grown 800% since November, according to Elizabeth Diana, a Kalshi spokeswoman. Skeptics also pointed to fundamental questions of how prediction markets work. Traditional wagers tend to center on binary outcomes, creating opportunities for disputes about whether a better won. Standard prediction market contracts also don't allow for betting on margin. Betters must put up the full amount of their wager. In traditional commodities markets, however, traders can essentially borrow money to control far larger positions but also lose big if things go the other way. Last month, Kalshi unveiled its first betting product that allows for margin perpetual futures contracts, or perps, in industry parlance. Perps essentially allow bettors to track whether the price of something goes up or down with no expiration date. Kalshi has also allowed perps to be traded on margin while setting up safeguards like restricting them only to deep pocketed traders. Since perps were unveiled on May 29, trading in those contracts has reached $5.5 billion in notional volume, Mr. Mansour said on Tuesday. For now, Kalshi is offering only perps tied to cryptocurrencies, but the company expects to announce more such contracts tied to a much wider array of assets. The infrastructure that we built for perpetuals will enable a significant expansion of what institutions can hedge on Kalshi, andy Ross, the head of the company's institutional business, said. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
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