AOC says Congress should break up Apple amid – Business News
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, revealed that she believes Congress should look to break up firms like Apple amid information that the tech giant would possibly quickly raise its costs on telephones and laptops because of a strained processing chip provide 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 stated.
Her statements reveal one of the numerous methods lawmakers are grappling with the realities of the AI race as firms really feel the squeeze of world demand for processing energy and as native communities wrestle with the prices of their use.
Like many different progressives, Ocasio-Cortez has advocated for a more government-led response, citing a mistrust of company affect.
“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 stated.
In current weeks, Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook signaled that the company would possibly quickly have no selection however to move some of its climbing prices off to shoppers.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” Cook stated in a current interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a city corridor occasion in Queens, NY, on Feb. 5, 2026. Aristide Economopoulos for the NY Post
“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, firms like Apple have dominated demand for the processing chip market, the half of a laptop that acts because the mind of a machine.
These chips, which require extremely subtle manufacturing, enable computer systems to carry out calculations, course of information and execute instructions.
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Now that AI firms are additionally including to demand, Apple finds itself competing for a dwindling provide of processors, driving the company’s prices up.
Beyond her views on the connection between the federal government and business, Ocasio-Cortez stated that she believes it’s time Congress re-visit methods it will probably mitigate prices of the AI-race which have climbed on a native degree.
In explicit, she believes it’s time for lawmakers to deal with the vitality pressure of information facilities.
Apple MacBook laptops sit on show at a store in decrease Manhattan, NY, on June 25, 2026. Getty Images
A buyer examines an Apple iPhone at a store on Sept. 2, 2025. REUTERS
When requested if she believed Congress should think about one thing past the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act, President Joe Biden’s signature technology investment invoice that grew to become law in 2022, Ocasio-Cortez stated 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 stated.
Among different provisions, the CHIP act included $11.2 billion to modernize the nation’s vitality grid, created clean vitality innovation packages and included $39 billion in home semiconductor manufacturing incentives.
The invoice didn’t handle the vitality consumption pressure brought on by information facilities.
“We are subsidizing a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers,” Ocasio-Cortez stated.
