Tech Brew Ride Home - The Chip-pocalypse Comes For Apple

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

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. In an interview, Tim Cook says Apple price hikes are "unavoidable" to offset surging memory and storage chip costs, and "the situation has become unsustainable" (The Wall Street Journal) Star Google AI Researcher Shazeer Joins OpenAI (The Information) Midjourney unveils its first hardware product, the Midjourney Scanner, an ultrasound-based full-body scanner; it is unclear how AI fits into the medical effort (The Verge) Businesses have started using Kalshi to hedge business risks; Kalshi says institutional trading volume on its platform has grown 800% since November 2025 (The New York Times) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the TechBrewrite Home for Thursday, June 18th, 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 Open AI, mid-Journey unveiled a bizarre full-body ultrasound scanner, and businesses are piling into Kalshi to hedge real-world risk. Here's what you miss 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.

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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 cost so much that Apple would have to raise device prices substantially to maintain its profit margins. Passing the higher costs onto 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 SKHenics 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 percent, while Shosha and 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, waferes 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 require licenses to work with them. When asked if those restrictions should be loosened, Cook said, I think every 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 hypers 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 discipline spending. Cook said Apple wouldn't use its cash 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 Nome Shazir has left Google to join OpenAI as lead for architecture research. He rejoined Google as a Gemini co-lead in 24 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 Anthropics, most advanced models ahead of the two companies' hotly anticipated initial public offerings. Shazir 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 chat GPT, 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 and, of the Transformer Architecture OpenAI told employees. Shazir 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 Nome's meaningful contributions to Google over the years,

and we wish him well. Shazir's career has not been without controversy. Shazir's startup character AI agreed to settle multiple lawsuits earlier this year after families alleged that character's chatbots contributed to teen suicides and mental health crises, end quote. I think basically, if this is the dude that Google essentially paid $2.7 billion to Aqua hire back a couple years ago, and Open AI needs someone to lead pre-training as their turnaround, this is about Open AI 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 Mid-Jurney? 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, Mid Journey 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 Mid Journey scanner, it's an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a 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. Holtz 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 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 three-day images. The scan takes about 60 seconds. Holtz said about a dozen people have been scanned so far. Here's how Mid Journey 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 live-streamed reveal. I'm still unclear on what Mid-Journey's AI image generation tech exactly has to do with the Mid-Journey medical effort beyond an alternative business for otherwise unused AI compute. Holtz hopes to put 10 of the scanners into a Mid-Journey 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 event. The Mid-Journey 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, Mid Journey 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

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beer bar and a specialist sports insurer, have already used Kalshi for hedging their business risks. But the platform has spent months hiring training 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 betters. And it raised $1 billion last 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. Polly Market, 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 the chief executive of Cal she 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. That Kalshi hedge worked like a charm, Andrew Friedman, a corporate lawyer who owns the Jeffrey said, Kalshi itself had suggested the hedge idea to Mr. Friedman. This year, GamePoint Capital and 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 golfers winning the U.S. Open and qualifying for a $1 million bonus. It would bet on Kalshi that the golfer would win, offsetting its financial risk. Historically, GamePoint 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 for 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 Mallets, Susquehanna's head of macro trading and prediction markets said in an interview. In April, Kalshi 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, jumped 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. Longstanding concern is whether prediction markets have enough liquidity to support such robust trading. Calci argues that problem is being addressed, with institutional trading volume on its platform having grown 800 percent 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 betters to track whether the price of something goes up or down with no expiration date. Calci 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 29th, 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 Kalshie, Andy Ross, the head of the company's institutional business said, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.