Elon Musk has publicly criticized memory chip pricing, a statement that places Samsung Electronics and SK hynix — the two largest Korean memory suppliers — directly in the path of the dispute.

The criticism was reported by Business Korea. Musk did not moderate his language. He attacked the pricing of memory chips outright, and the report frames the attack as raising explicit questions about how Samsung and SK hynix will respond.

Who does the criticism hit?

The named subjects are precise:

• Samsung Electronics — the world's largest memory chipmaker by revenue, and a leading producer of DRAM and NAND flash.
• SK hynix — the second-largest memory supplier globally and the dominant producer of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in AI accelerators.

Both companies base their memory businesses in South Korea. Both sit at the top of a supply chain that has repriced sharply upward over the past two years, driven above all by demand for AI training hardware.

Why does a pricing complaint from Musk carry weight?

Musk controls xAI, the company behind the Grok family of large language models, and he holds a central position at Tesla and SpaceX. Companies building large AI systems buy memory at enormous scale — HBM stacks sit alongside the GPU dies in every Nvidia accelerator, and DRAM fills the servers that run inference.

When the single largest category of cost in an AI datacenter is compute, memory ranks immediately behind it. A buyer of that size calling prices into question publicly, rather than through procurement channels, signals a negotiation moved into the open.

What happens next?

The report does not state what specific prices or contracts Musk objected to, and neither Samsung nor SK hynix has publicly responded at the time of writing. The open questions are concrete:

• Whether either supplier issues a formal reply.
• Whether Musk's companies shift order volumes or suppliers in response.
• Whether the criticism precedes a broader pricing dispute across the AI hardware supply chain.

Memory pricing is set by long-term supply agreements as well as spot markets, so public pressure alone rarely moves contract terms quickly. But the two companies named control a large share of global DRAM and HBM output, and they cannot ignore a customer of Musk's scale.

One criticism, two Korean suppliers named, and no response yet — that is where this stands.