Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls to ‘Break Up’ Tech Giants Like Apple Over Price Hikes

 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said it is time to “break up” tech giants like Apple, with the liberal lawmaker saying she is tired of those companies jacking up the price on electronics while average Americans struggle to get by.

AOC vented about Big Tech during an interview with Fox News on Sunday.

“The problem that we have is these big problems, they think they are governments. They want to be governments,” she said. “They want to have totally unchecked power, and I believe that we need to pursue antitrust.”

Ocasio-Cortez continued, “We need to break up a lot of these companies that are far, far too big. And we also need to be instituting consumer protections.”

She also ripped the emerging artificial intelligence companies, without naming any in particular.

“They are sitting in their private investor calls and they are so giddy about all the people they are going to put out of work,” AOC said.

Her comments on the tech giants came soon after Apple hiked prices on several products, including Macbooks and iPads. Some of those increases were as much as $500.

Apple blamed the higher prices on the “rapid expansion of AI data centers” that has “created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage.” CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal the hikes were “unavoidable.”

The company’s stock price took a hit right after the hikes were announced. Apple’s stock dropped from about $301 at the start of last week to $283.78 per share at the end of the week. It remains the second most valuable company, with a market cap of $4.17 trillion.

“Now your ability to buy laptops, computers, iPads, electronics in general is going to go up, because data centers are sucking up all of our own industrial supply,” AOC added. “In a lot of ways, we are subsidizing the development of a lot of these pieces of these AI data centers.”

Watch above.

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