If you bought a laptop in Taiwan last month, maybe a back-to-school machine for your kid, you paid more for it than you would have in May.

Not because of tariffs. Not because of a typhoon. Because of memory chips — the components that let a computer hold information while it's working — and memory chips have gotten expensive because the world's AI companies are buying them faster than anyone can make them.

That's the AI boom, showing up on a household receipt. And the chain doesn't stop there — because that boom runs on borrowed money, raised in New York, at interest rates set in Washington. Which is exactly what we're looking at this week.