Apple Under Fire As AI Chip Crunch Drives Up Prices

US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for Big Tech companies including Apple to be broken up, after the company lifted prices on several Macs and iPads amid a worsening AI-driven memory chip crunch.

Apple has blamed the increases on soaring costs for memory and storage components, with demand being fuelled by the rapid build-out of AI data centres.

The price rises, which have hit some MacBook and iPad models by hundreds of dollars in the US, have sparked fresh debate over whether consumers are now being forced to pay for the infrastructure demands of the AI boom.

“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 told Fox News.

She argued that data centres were “sucking up” industrial supply, pushing up the cost of laptops, computers, iPads and consumer electronics more broadly.

“In a lot of ways, we are subsidising the development of a lot of these AI data centres,” she said.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has previously said price increases were “unavoidable”, with the company trying to absorb rising component costs before the situation became unsustainable.

Analysts have labelled the crisis ‘RAMageddon’, warning that memory and storage shortages could reshape pricing across the broader consumer electronics market.

Apple is not the only company under pressure.

Gaming consoles, laptops and smartphones have all been affected by higher component costs, with AI infrastructure increasingly competing with consumer tech manufacturers for the same supply chains.

Sony’s PS5 sales collapsed 58% year on year in the US in May, while Australian console prices have climbed sharply after repeated increases from Sony and Microsoft.

Ocasio-Cortez also criticised Big Tech over mass layoffs, rising energy costs linked to data centres and the threat posed by AI to jobs.

She said existing legislation such as the CHIPS Act did not anticipate the scale of the AI data centre boom, adding that Congress should revisit how it regulates the sector.

Ocasio-Cortez has backed legislation with Senator Bernie Sanders that would impose a moratorium on new AI data centres.

It remains unclear whether Apple’s latest US price hikes will flow through to Australian pricing.