Overview
- Over the weekend Valve engineers told reporters the global RAM shortage is getting worse and that retail prices lag bulk supply by about three to six months.
- Engineers said Valve is producing only as many Steam Machines as its memory allocations allow, which constrained launch volumes and forced a randomized reservation draw to ration stock.
- The base 512GB Steam Machine starts at $1,049, a price Valve says it could not subsidize because higher DRAM and NVMe costs pushed component bills up.
- Industry forecasts and company comments from hardware makers expect elevated memory and GPU prices through 2027 with relief unlikely until 2028, keeping near-term price cuts unlikely.
- The squeeze is driven mainly by AI and hyperscaler data-center demand for memory and storage, a shift that could keep consumer hardware scarce, raise prices, and lengthen wait times for new devices.