It’s probably not news to anyone that prices for just about everything have gone through the roof in recent months and years. From utilities to groceries, rising costs have forced families to pinch pennies and change their shopping habits. However, there is a relatively new culprit for the skyrocketing prices of phones, laptops, appliances, cars, and more. It’s the massive AI companies buying up the memory chips that go into almost all of the electronic devices we use every day. People are calling it “RAMageddon,” and so far, Washington has largely failed to do anything about it.
The problem is that AI companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers with servers that require many of the same memory and storage chips consumer technology companies and others use in their products. The supply simply can’t keep up with the extraordinary demand from AI companies for these chips, and in many cases, AI companies can outbid and sign longer contracts for chips than consumer tech companies. As a result, the chips in question, RAM and flash storage, have jumped in price by 50% or even 100%, sometimes more, in just a few months.
The biggest AI companies and their massive data centers get everything they need, but you have to pay 20% more for a back-to-school laptop or a new car.
Fortunately, many of the companies affected by the chip shortage are stepping up to help solve it. Some tech companies on the losing end of the AI industry’s buying spree have reportedly offered to put their own money behind building new supply. Earlier this year, Apple announced it is partnering with the chip manufacturer Broadcom and investing $30 billion to produce chips at a facility in Colorado. Also this past summer, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company committed to invest $100 billion in chip manufacturing in the United States. That’s far more constructive than what the AI industry itself has done, which so far has mostly meant signing bigger contracts and letting device makers and ordinary shoppers deal with the consequences. When the companies actually hurt by this shortage choose to help fund the fix, it makes clear how little the companies that caused the squeeze have done to help clean it up.
Congress and the Trump administration have a menu of tools they’ve already used once to strengthen domestic chip capacity, and there’s no reason not to apply them again with more urgency. Streamlining permitting for new fabrication and memory plants, extending certainty on export controls so manufacturers can plan multiyear investments, and directing continued research funding toward next-generation memory technology would all reduce the odds that ordinary consumers keep absorbing the cost of an AI arms race they have no part in.
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Lawmakers should also take a harder look at whether existing antitrust and trade tools are equipped to address a market in which a handful of companies can outbid entire industries for a critical input. If AI companies can lock up years of chip supply through long-term contracts, regulators need to understand whether that behavior is a natural consequence of demand or a structural problem that requires intervention before prices climb even further.
None of this requires slowing down AI development in the U.S. It requires Washington to recognize that the costs of that development are landing on car buyers, students shopping for laptops, and families replacing a broken appliance, and to treat that as a policy problem worth solving with the same urgency that got chip manufacturing back on domestic soil in the first place. The companies footing the bill for new supply have already shown what leadership looks like. It’s time for Washington to match it.
Driena Sixto is the former spokesperson for Turning Point Action and currently is Spanish media director for the Lincoln Media Foundation.