Start with what just happened to Apple. Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal that price increases across Apple’s lineup are now unavoidable, because the company can no longer absorb what it’s paying for memory and storage chips. He described the current RAM squeeze as something he hasn’t seen in over 40 years in the industry. Samsung, Microsoft, Sony, and Dell have all made some version of the same announcement recently. The reason isn’t a mystery: AI companies and cloud providers are buying up the same DRAM and NAND chips that go into phones, laptops, and game consoles, and they’re outbidding everyone else to get them. Component prices have roughly quadrupled in some categories. None of this is hypothetical — last week Apple raised prices on most of their products (some by over 20%.)

That’s landing on people who are already stretched thin. Tariffs have pushed up the price of plenty of everyday goods, wages haven’t kept pace with cost of living in a lot of places, and now AI’s hardware appetite is adding a second tax on top of it — one that has nothing to do with anything the average person asked for.

And that’s the real problem with the AI industry’s pitch to the public: it doesn’t have a consumer story that justifies the cost it’s imposing on consumers. The real money in AI is enterprise — selling productivity tools, agents, and infrastructure to businesses. That’s a fine business model, but it puts the industry in an awkward spot when it asks the public to support the datacenters making all of it possible. The pitch to regular people boils down to some mix of “this will change everything” and “you’ll get left behind if you don’t use it,” while the same industry is busy selling employers tools explicitly marketed to cut headcount. Asking someone to root for the infrastructure behind a technology that might replace their job — while they’re also paying more for their phone because of it — is not a great recruiting pitch for “AI is good for you.”

It’s not surprising people are turning on datacenters. They’re being asked to subsidize this industry’s growth repeatedly – through their bills, through the security of their jobs, and now with steep price increases to essential goods. While you’re hearing a lot about the impact of datacenters on water and electricity use, the real yelling will start this fall…when the base model iPhone costs $999.