Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, revealed that she believes Congress should look to break up companies like Apple amid news that the tech giant might soon raise its prices on phones and laptops due to a strained processing chip supply chain.
“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,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Her statements reveal one of the many ways lawmakers are grappling with the realities of the AI race as companies feel the squeeze of global demand for processing power and as local communities wrestle with the costs of their use.
Like many other progressives, Ocasio-Cortez has advocated for a more government-led response, citing 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 said.
In recent weeks, Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook signaled that the company might soon have no choice but to pass some of its climbing costs off to consumers.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“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.”
For years, companies like Apple have dominated demand for the processing chip market, the part of a computer that acts as the brain of a device.
These chips, which require highly sophisticated production, allow computers to perform calculations, process data and execute commands.
Now that AI companies are also adding to demand, Apple finds itself competing for a dwindling supply of processors, driving the company’s costs up.
Beyond her views on the relationship between the government and business, Ocasio-Cortez said that she believes it’s time Congress re-visit ways it can mitigate costs of the AI-race that have climbed on a local level.
In particular, she believes it’s time for lawmakers to address the energy strain of data centers.
When asked if she believed Congress should consider something beyond the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, President Joe Biden’s signature technology investment bill that became law in 2022, Ocasio-Cortez said she thought so.
“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 said.
Among other provisions, the CHIP act included $11.2 billion to modernize the country’s energy grid, created clean energy innovation programs and included $39 billion in domestic semiconductor production incentives.
The bill did not address the energy consumption strain caused by data centers.
“We are subsidizing a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers,” Ocasio-Cortez said.