Ocasio-Cortez wants Congress to break up big tech like Apple. And it comes as Apple warns it may soon raise phone and laptop prices

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is asking Congress to break up large technology companies like Apple, as the company gets ready to possibly raise prices on its laptops and phones. This comes at a time when the global supply of processing chips is under heavy strain, pushing companies to rethink their pricing to handle rising costs, reports Fox News.

The situation is getting harder for manufacturers. Processing chips act as the brains of our devices, so they are needed for everything from simple math to complex data work. Apple has long led this market, but a huge jump in demand from AI companies has created a bottleneck. This shortage is raising costs for producers, and it appears customers might soon feel the effects.

Outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook recently spoke about these problems in an interview. “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook said. He went on to explain the company’s view, stating, “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 lawmaker ties chip shortages to a broader concern about corporate power

Representative Ocasio-Cortez sees these events as a sign that corporate power has grown too large. She argues that these companies are working with a level of influence that pushes against the role of government. “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,” she stated.

Her proposed answer is a stronger approach to antitrust action and consumer protection through new laws. “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. The pricing pressure Cook described comes even as Apple is said to be preparing a cheaper iPhone model meant to widen its customer base.

Beyond the cost of hardware, the Representative is also looking at how the fast growth of AI is affecting local infrastructure, especially energy use. She raised concerns that current laws, such as the CHIPS Act signed into law in 2022, are no longer enough for today’s situation. She noted that the rise in demand from AI data centers was not fully expected when that bill was written.

“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. While the CHIPS Act included billions of dollars for domestic semiconductor production and energy grid upgrades, it did not specifically cover the energy needs created by these large data centers. 

Apple’s hardware lineup is also expanding in other ways, with the company reportedly working on a foldable iPhone design that could add to its production demands. The Representative pointed out that government money is now being used to support these facilities, which she believes calls for a change in how Congress handles the industry.

“We are subsidizing a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers,” she said. As the tech industry keeps working through these supply chain problems and energy needs, the debate in Washington over how much power these companies should hold is growing.