Elon Musk has praised Micron’s approach to future memory pricing while warning that unnamed rivals’ aggressive charges will be remembered, as supply shortages drive exceptional profits across the sector.
Elon Musk has used X to praise Micron for what he described as a more restrained approach to future memory pricing, while accusing unnamed rivals of charging too aggressively for chips that are becoming central to artificial intelligence hardware. In his post on 13 October 2026, Musk said Micron had been “reasonable regarding future memory prices, while others have been extortionate, which is something today’s customers will not forget”. He did not name the competitors he was criticising, nor did he disclose any contract terms, quantities or pricing details.
That endorsement sits alongside a harder commercial reality. Micron has said its gross margin for fiscal Q2 2026 was about 75%, and it forecast roughly 81% for fiscal Q3 2026. The figures suggest that even as one major customer publicly commends the company’s restraint, Micron remains able to command unusually strong profitability in a market shaped by tight supply and intense demand.
The broader backdrop is an AI hardware shortage that has lifted the value of memory across the supply chain. Analysts cited in financial coverage have projected shortfalls in DRAM supply of about 20% in 2026, 19% in 2027 and 15% in 2028, as data centres continue to absorb high-bandwidth memory at a pace the industry cannot quickly match. High-bandwidth memory, or HBM, is a specialist component used in advanced AI accelerators, and it depends on the same broader manufacturing ecosystem as more familiar DRAM products. That means bottlenecks in wafer capacity, packaging and allocation decisions can spill over across memory markets.
Musk’s comments therefore amount to more than a compliment to one supplier. They highlight how pricing power in memory is increasingly linked to strategic scarcity rather than simple product competition. Even if Micron has offered better forward terms than some rivals, the company’s margin profile indicates a market in which customers are still paying up. For buyers of PCs, phones and AI systems, the consequences are likely to show up later in higher prices, leaner memory configurations or less generous discounts, rather than in any immediate change at the point of sale.
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