Memory chip prices are skyrocketing, thanks to AI demand, and there's no end in sight.
Why it matters: "Chipflation" is pushing up the prices for electronic goods like smartphones and laptops, as well as the costs for cloud storage and hardware — it also helps explain the eye-popping ascents in semiconductor stock prices.
While the overall effect on inflation may not be huge — other kinds of products get more weight in the government's measure of consumer prices — the scale of this boom is unprecedented.
By the numbers: The Producer Price Index for electronic components and accessories, which measures what companies pay for semiconductor chips and other electronics and accessories, has gone vertical this year.
The PPI for those components rose 27.6% in June from the same time last year — the largest increase in records that date back to 1966, easily eclipsing the surge in prices during the dawn of the PC era in 1980 and the supply crunch in chips during the pandemic.
And this category might understate what's happening because it includes some unrelated electronic inputs.
Follow the money: The AIhyperscalers (Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, et al) are locking up memory supply years in advance with long-term agreements.
That's leaving traditional PC and phone makers competing for a shrinking pool of supply.
The latest: Apple is testing memory chips from Chinese memory chip maker CXMT as it deals with skyrocketing costs, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Apple would need White House approval to get around rules that typically prohibit such a tie-up.
The big picture: We've never lived through a moment when prices for electronics have been such an inflationary force.
Indeed, it's a reversal from a decades-long trend of the cost of computer memory becoming cheaper over time.
Prices for memory have risen more than sixfold over the past year, according to a Morgan Stanley note in June that appears to have been the first to coin the term "chipflation."
Flashback: The price of a gigabyte of DRAM — the fast processing memory inside servers, PCs and phones — fell by around a factor of 10 every five years from 1957 to 2020, per the note.
"However, this trend no longer applies in the AI economy."
How it works: "Memory" is a way of describing a device's brain — these chips essentially hold information on whatever a machine needs in the moment to get its work done.
That could mean a web search or playing a video, or, lately, an AI model answering a question. It's basic stuff, until it's not.
"Memory chips are easy to ignore until your laptop slows down, your phone costs more, or, [if you're a company], your cloud bill jumps," Shawn Kim, head of Morgan Stanley's Europe and Asia technology team, explained in a podcast in June.
Friction point: Earlier in the summer, when chipflation was first getting talked about, some analysts expected companies to pull back tech spending in the face of rising costs.
Now, the thinking has shifted.Companies seem eager to keep spending.
Companies don't have FOMO, they have its nerdier corollary — FOMP, or "Fear of Missing Procurement," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note Monday.
What to watch: The July Consumer Price Index report is out on Wednesday and will track any rises in prices consumers are paying for electronics.
Morgan Stanley forecasts only about a 0.10 percentage point increase in headline CPI because of this crunch, but a potential 10% year-over-year increase for computers specifically.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video Saturday giving herself a shot in preparation to freeze her eggs, she instantly injected issues of fertility, family and feminism into political discourse.
And some of the online backlash from the conservative right is making Republicans, including some in the White House, a little nervous.
Why it matters: The New York Democrat's Instagram announcement — "Don't be weird about this, even though I know all of you will be," she said — dominated social media and furthered speculation that AOC is plotting a White House run in two years.
Friction point: The left cheered the 36-year-old on. The right was divided between conservatives who want the U.S. birthrate to increase and those critical of women delaying pregnancy.
"She'll turn 37 in a couple months. If she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy," conservative commentator Matt Walsh posted on X. "This desire to start having children late in life is completely baffling to me."
"Conservative men dunking on AOC for freezing her eggs is not a winning message with women voters," replied Alexa Henning, a MAGA consultant who recently left the State Department.
"I have many conservative friends who, because they decided to put careers, first froze their eggs and had have babies and families later in life," Henning added. "That should be celebrated."
Inside the room: At the White House, where President Trump has championed in-vitro fertilization, there's clearly a desire to embrace Henning's point of view.
"We most certainly want to encourage more women and families to have children, period," a senior White House official said. "That's a diplomatic way of saying, 'Yes, the Matt Walsh messaging is not helpful.' "
"This isn't really a winner for Republicans," a Trump adviser said, noting the midterm elections are less than three months away.
Republican pollster Adam Geller echoed that point: "AOC knows how to get attention. She knows how to stand out. This should be treated as a stunt. And my advice to Republicans is, don't take the bait."
The big picture: In the attention economy of today's reality-show politics, creating viral moments is the coin of the realm that comes naturally to millennial digital natives like AOC.
AOC's announcement also carried the extra political payoff of uniting Democrats and dividing Republicans.
"This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life," she said.
Between the lines: Katie Miller, a conservative podcaster and wife of Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, told Axios she didn't believe this would be a "major issue" in the midterms, and she questioned how successful egg-freezing is.
"Some kids are better than zero kids," Miller said. "If you're going to increase the birthrate, you can't be a purist about how it happens. The most efficient way to have babies is the old-fashioned way: Get married, have children young."
Another conservative podcast host, Allie Beth Stuckey, questioned why Ocasio-Cortez hadn't had children by now with her longtime partner and criticized the Democrat on X for "glamorizing the lie that women can have it all. You can't. Biology is real and how you order your life makes or breaks your future."
That prompted yet another disagreement from a fellow conservative woman who replied: "Your life decisions shouldn't be determined by an online army of self-appointed morality officers with an agenda."
Move over, data centers. AI's climate impact may extend well beyond the electricity it consumes.
Why it matters: A new peer-reviewed study finds AI could help produce more oil and natural gas — and produce a climate impact the authors argue could far outweigh the technology's benefits for renewable energy.
Driving the news: The research, just published in a Nature journal, concludes AI's role in boosting oil and gas production would outweigh its climate benefits from accelerating renewable energy, leading to a net increase in emissions under a range of scenarios.
The study is among the first to estimate how AI-driven gains in fossil fuel production could affect global emissions.
"Most assessments of AI's climate impact are framed as a tradeoff between data center energy use and the emissions AI might help avoid through renewables and efficiency gains," said Holly Alpine, co-author of the paper.
"What's missing from that calculation entirely is the other side of the same ledger: the emissions enabled from using AI to make fossil fuel production cheaper and more profitable," Alpine said.
Holly Alpine and Will Alpine, former Microsoft employees who founded the nonprofit initiative Enabled Emissions Campaign in 2024, co-led the study with researchers from Purdue University and an independent researcher.
How it works: AI can help oil companies find new resources and recover more from existing fields. It can also help renewable energy by improving forecasting and operations. The new study argues the fossil-fuel gains are likely to dominate.
By the numbers: The researchers estimate AI could add emissions equal to roughly 1% to 5% of the global energy sector's 2024 emissions under the scenarios they modeled.
The study estimates those emissions would be roughly three to 13 times the International Energy Agency's estimate of current data-center emissions.
The other side: A spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's main trade group, disputed the idea that more energy and lower emissions are in conflict.
"The U.S. oil and natural gas industry is continuing to produce more energy while reducing emissions by investing in better technology, implementing stronger operational practices and supporting science-based policy," API spokesperson Andrea Woods said in a statement.
State of play: The oil industry's embrace of AI has accelerated over the past two years.
Producers like Chevron, ExxonMobil, ADNOC and Aramco say AI is helping identify promising drilling prospects and improve recovery from existing fields.
Oilfield-service giants SLB, Halliburton and Baker Hughes are deploying AI to guide drilling and optimize well placement.
Analysts and consultancies, from Goldman Sachs to Wood Mackenzie, argue AI could lower production costs and increase economically recoverable reserves.
The big picture: AI is a general-purpose technology that can boost productivity in both fossil fuels and clean energy. Some experts argue the more important question is which applications society chooses to prioritize.
What they're saying: "I think cleantech is going to win anyway, so let's just focus on how we unlock clean energy resources with AI," said Brian Janous, who previously worked with Holly Alpine at Microsoft and now runs data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure.
"I'm glad Will and Holly are doing what they're doing. I'm not sure what it's going to change, but at least it puts pressure on," he said.
Zoom in: The researchers used a computer model of the global economy that estimates how AI-driven productivity gains ripple through energy markets.
Across the study's 64 modeled scenarios, emissions declined only when fossil-fuel productivity gains from AI were zero, Holly Alpine said.
The finding suggests that supporting renewable energy alone "will not get us to emissions' reduction."
Yes, but: The model doesn't attempt to estimate AI's potential to accelerate cleantech breakthroughs such as fusion or long-duration storage.
"There is a lot of AI dreaming out there," said Michael Lazarus, senior scientist emeritus at the climate research group Stockholm Environment Institute who advised the authors on the study. "I don't know how one would anticipate that and model it."
What we're watching: The study's authors are making a call that echoes that of many others working at the intersection of AI and environmental issues: more transparency.
"If we can start with transparency about the effects, then we can start to think about how to govern it," said Will Alpine.
Violent crime kept falling across many of the nation's largest cities through June, with homicides down 17.2% from the first half of 2025, according to preliminary data reviewed by Axios.
Why it matters: The decline now spans two presidencies — it began falling under President Biden after the pandemic-era surge, and has kept dropping under President Trump.
Trump came into office casting America as being overrun by crime at time when the numbers were already declining dramatically.
As that decline has continued during his watch he's taken credit for it, often linking it to his deployment of the National Guard in cities such as Washington, D.C., and Memphis, Tenn., to reduced violent crime rates there.
By the numbers: An Axios analysis of the Major Cities Chiefs Association's (MCCA) survey of 66 large U.S. communities found drops in violent crime in the first six months of 2026 compared to the same period last year.
Homicides fell 17.2%.
Robberies dropped 16.6%.
Rapes declined 6.2%.
Aggravated assaults fell 5.7%.
Taken together, the four categories were down about 8.3%, for roughly 14,200 fewer reported violent crimes, according to the Axios review.
Zoom in: The homicide drops are especially striking in several cities that have struggled with high levels of violence.
D.C. reported 46 homicides, down 43.9% from 82 in the first half of 2025.
Homicides in Memphis fell 43.7%, from 119 killings to 67, and 38.3% in Houston, from 154 to 95.
Philadelphia recorded 83 homicides, down 27.2% from 114.
The intrigue: Aurora, Colo. — a city Trump falsely singled out as being overrun by Venezuelan immigrant gangs during the 2024 election — saw a 58.8% drop in homicides.
Caveat: Some of the biggest percentage drops came in places with relatively few killings to begin with — which can make the declines look particularly.
Newark fell 64.7% from 17 to six homicides, Raleigh fell 63.6% from 11 to four, for example.
Yes, but: Some cities had relatively small homicide totals that were significantly higher than in the first six months of 2025.
Honolulu jumped 85.7%, from seven homicides to 13.
San Diego jumped 81.3%, from 16 to 29 — continuing the increase Axios identified in the first quarter.
Zoom out: Another major crime tracker is seeing similar trends in declining violent crime.
A Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) analysis found homicides down 18% among 30 reporting cities in the first half of 2026. The group says the decline began in the second half of 2022.
The finding is notable because crime has fallen across cities with different political leadership, policing strategies, economic conditions and levels of federal involvement, CCJ said.
What they're saying: "President Trump promised to make America safe again — and the data proves he is delivering faster and more decisively than any administration in history," the White House said in a statement.
New revelations about "rogue" AI agents have exposed a dystopian hazard: Give an agent a goal, and it may decide that hacking, deception or rule-breaking is worth the payoff.
Why it matters: Billions of AI agents could soon be acting on behalf of humans across the real world, multiplying the consequences of every loophole, incentive and boundary they learn to exploit.
Zoom in: The potential dangers of agentic overreach were laid bare over the weekend with Australia's first known autonomous AI hack, triggered by an innocuous request to book a sold-out fitness class.
An Australian man's AI assistant found a security flaw and used it to book him into classes months beyond the system's normal limit.
When he asked it to move him up a waitlist, the agent went further: It discovered the booking system had no safeguard preventing one user from canceling another's reservation — then used the flaw to kick a stranger off the list.
Zoom out: The gym episode was publicized amid a far more ominous run of disclosures from the AI frontier, where agents have resorted to hacking, deception and other unauthorized tactics during controlled tests.
At cyber conference Black Hat last week, OpenAI revealed that its agents had spent weeks exploiting the company's own testing infrastructure before hacking AI platform Hugging Face.
The agents discovered they could leave messages for future agents inside OpenAI's systems — and turned the loophole into a makeshift message board for swapping exploits, credentials and strategies without human direction.
When OpenAI researchers responded to a server outage, they inadvertently wiped the board without knowing it existed.
Within two days, the agents had found another way to communicate. They rebuilt their network and resumed coordinating even more aggressively.
When researchers finally analyzed the agents' behavior, they found the first and second message board that eventually carried the agents out of their "sandbox" testing environment and into Hugging Face's system.
What they're saying: OpenAI researcher Michael Dalton said that in the near future, "we should expect that threat actors will intentionally deploy, optimize, weaponize, and use offensive agent collectives in the manner that we have just described here." He called it a "watershed moment."
In response, OpenAI has begun "consciously slowing down research," including on its latest model Astra, to ensure it has the right cyber safeguards in place.
Between the lines: Across dozens of AI breaches, humans defined the objective while the agents improvised the means, including in ways their users or researchers never envisioned.
Faced with a barrier, the agents kept searching for another way through. It's the same programmed instinct — at a vastly higher level of sophistication — that got a stranger bumped off a gym waitlist.
The big picture: These incidents are vivid examples of AI's "alignment" problem, or the challenge of ensuring software respects the implicit ethical and practical boundaries humans take for granted.
An AI trained to pursue a goal doesn't automatically inherit human judgment about what means are acceptable. Tell it to win, and it may pursue victory by methods you never imagined or authorized.
Researchers have spent years wrestling with alignment, mostly through thought experiments imagining a future superintelligence pursuing a goal so single-mindedly that it destroys humanity.
The other side: The relentless goal-seeking that makes autonomous agents unnerving is also producing some of AI's most extraordinary breakthroughs.
Anthropic revealed Monday that Claude made a major advance on a 167-year-old math problem that generations of mathematicians have struggled to crack, after burning through 650 failed ideas.
The human overseeing the effortsaid his involvement was mostly limited to words of encouragement, including "keep going" and "believe in yourself."
The bottom line: The promise and peril of AI agents spring from the same source: machines that don't stop until they find a way.
Over the past few months, Fortune has spoken with senior HP leaders to understand how the company is evolving—from innovation and culture to customer engagement and the future of work.
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