Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, has called for Congress to consider breaking up large technology companies like Apple, citing concerns over corporate power and impending price increases on popular devices.
Ocasio-Cortez stated that companies have become too large and that consumers need greater protections. "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," she said. She expressed a view shared by many progressives, advocating for a government-led response due to a distrust of corporate influence.
"The problem that we have is that these big companies think they are governments. They want to be governments. They want to have totally unchecked power," Ocasio-Cortez commented.
These remarks come as Apple CEO Tim Cook signaled that price increases on products like iPhones and MacBooks may become unavoidable. Cook recently indicated in an interview that the company has been absorbing rising costs but that the situation has become unsustainable.
"Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable," Cook 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."
The strain on the processing chip supply chain, a critical component for electronic devices, is a significant factor. For years, companies like Apple have been major consumers of these chips, which are essential for device functionality. The increasing demand from artificial intelligence companies is now intensifying competition for a limited supply of processors, driving up costs for manufacturers.
Ocasio-Cortez also believes Congress should re-examine ways to mitigate the costs associated with the AI race at a local level, specifically addressing the energy demands of data centers. She suggested that the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, signed into law in 2022, may not be sufficient to address the current landscape.
"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," Ocasio-Cortez explained. The CHIPS Act allocated significant funding for domestic semiconductor production and energy grid modernization but did not specifically address the energy consumption of data centers.
"We are subsidizing a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers," she added.