Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decried Apple’s recent $200 price hikes on computers and tablets, which the tech giant blamed on a memory chip crunch — and called for breaking up Big Tech.
“We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big, and we need to be instituting consumer protections for people,” the New York Democrat told Fox News.
Most analysts believe the so-called “RAM-ageddon” crisis is a result of the rapid build-out of data centers to power artificial intelligence, which has turbocharged demand for memory chips.
Citing memory chip shortages, Apple jacked up prices last week on a handful of MacBook and iPads, in some cases by $200 or more. Price increases were about 15% to 20% for Macs and 15% to 25% for iPads.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal.
Some experts, including famed Apple whisperer Mark Gurman, have argued that the price hikes are a “new normal” for Apple and likely to stay even after the memory chip crunch gets resolved.
“Now [the price] to buy laptops, computers, iPads, electronics in general will go up, because the data centers are sucking up all of our own industrial supply, and so we’re paying in a lot of ways, we are subsidizing the development of a lot of data centers,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) contended.
“The problem that we have is that these big companies, they think they are governments, they want to be governments, they want to have totally unchecked power,” she later added. “I believe that we need to pursue antitrust, and we also need to give some more protections for consumers.”
She further dinged Big Tech companies for conducting mass layoffs over recent months and for pushing up energy prices for consumers, all while threatening to undermine people’s jobs with AI.
When pressed about whether Congress should take action similar to the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, which included billions in federal funding to support the reshoring of semiconductor manufacturing, Ocasio-Cortez noted that policymakers didn’t anticipate the AI boom when they wrote that legislation.
“The CHIPS Act was passed before we saw this huge development in AI, so the CHIPS Act was really passed before data centers were a thing, so it wasn’t designed to anticipate the huge amount of supply that these centers are sucking up,” the congresswoman explained.
Ocasio-Cortez has backed legislation with her kindred spirit, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), to impose a moratorium on the development of AI data centers.
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