January 1, Squad Democrat Calls for Breaking Up American Tech Giant

Wyatt’s Take

• New York socialist wants government to dismantle one of America’s most successful companies while prices climb for working families
• Tech giant faces crushing costs from chip shortages as Chinese competition heats up — but progressives see opportunity for power grab
• Same Democrats who passed Biden’s massive spending bills now blame private companies for consequences of their own policies

A radical House Democrat is calling for the federal government to tear apart major American technology companies as consumers brace for significant price increases on phones and laptops. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested Congress should break up firms like Apple, claiming they’ve grown “far, far too big.”

“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.

The New York socialist’s comments come as Apple’s outgoing CEO Tim Cook warned that mounting costs from strained processing chip supplies may force the company to raise prices. For years, American tech companies dominated the market for processing chips — the sophisticated components that serve as the brain of computers and phones.

Now artificial intelligence companies are adding massive new demand, creating fierce competition for a shrinking supply of processors and driving costs through the roof.

“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.”

Rather than support American innovation and competitiveness, Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive allies are pushing for more government control. Like many on the far left, she’s advocating for Washington-led responses, citing distrust of private enterprise.

“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.

The congressman also wants Congress to revisit legislation addressing energy consumption by data centers, which power artificial intelligence operations. She criticized President Joe Biden’s CHIPS Act — a massive spending bill passed in 2022 — for not anticipating current AI development.

“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.

The CHIPS Act included $11.2 billion to modernize the country’s energy grid, created clean energy programs, and provided $39 billion in domestic semiconductor production incentives. The bill did not address energy consumption strain caused by data centers.

“We are subsidizing a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Why It Matters

When working families face higher prices for the technology they depend on, Washington socialists see opportunity for a government takeover. Breaking up successful American companies won’t bring chip prices down or restore supply chains — it’ll just hand more control to politicians who’ve never built anything. Real solutions require supporting domestic manufacturing and getting government out of the way, not more regulations from people who think they know better than the market.