When Apple raised MacBook and iPad prices by up to 20 per cent in June, wiping US$263 billion (S$340 billion) off its market value in a day, it blamed “unsustainable” memory prices. Then it went to Washington to ask permission to buy dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) from a Chinese company sitting on a Pentagon blacklist.

Kim Yang-paeng, a semiconductor researcher at South Korea’s state-run Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade, does not think Apple actually wants to buy these chips. He thinks it wants to be seen trying.

“From the consumer’s point of view, when prices go up 20 or 30 per cent, it looks like all of that is going straight into Apple’s pocket,” Kim told The Korea Herald. Apple, he said, can now tell a better story: That it shouldered political risk, went looking at Chinese memory and found nothing it could use.

The Financial Times reported on July 8 that Apple has begun testing DRAM from ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) for devices sold in China. Bloomberg had already reported earlier that chief executive Tim Cook took the case personally to Trump administration officials.

The sell-off showed how seriously the market took the threat. Even after Samsung Electronics reported the best quarter in its history, its shares fell 6.25 per cent and SK hynix fell 5.68 per cent on July 8, because investors were not pricing the record earnings. They were pricing the possibility that South Korea’s grip on memory had finally found a challenger.

The AI memory squeeze

For most of the last two decades, Apple sold memory the way airlines sell legroom. Base configurations stayed lean....