Valve Warns the RAM Crisis Hasn't Even Peaked Yet

Retail RAM prices right now are bad. According to Valve, they're also outdated. In an interview with Bloomberg's Jason Schreier about the Steam Machine's development, Valve engineer Yazan Aldehayyat dropped a detail that should worry anyone planning a PC build or hardware purchase in the next year: what consumers see on store shelves today is running three to six months behind what manufacturers are actually charging at the bulk level.

"Honestly, it's still getting worse. Just in case people are not aware. What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months."

That lag is the part that should concern you more than today's sticker shock. If bulk prices have continued climbing since early 2026, the increases baked into components being manufactured right now won't show up in the products you can actually buy until late 2026 or early 2027. The Steam Machine you can buy today for $1,049 at its base 512GB configuration was priced using memory Valve sourced months ago. Future batches could cost even more.

Fellow Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed the crisis is already constraining production. "We're basically building everything we can get our hands on," he said. "We're limited by memory capacity, for sure." Aldehayyat added that while Valve anticipated sourcing problems when it formally announced the Steam Machine in November 2025, "the extent was beyond anything we actually expected."

Valve Isn't Alone Here

This isn't one company panicking in isolation. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra has said he expects the RAM shortage to persist through 2027. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has said she expects memory costs to double again before fall 2027. Lenovo has predicted we're entering a new normal for RAM pricing. Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney warned back in late 2025 that high-end PC gamers would face inflated prices "for several years." Research published earlier this month projected sharp price increases through 2027 with no reductions expected until 2028. Every major player in the hardware space is saying some version of the same thing, and none of them are optimistic.

The root cause hasn't changed: AI data centres are consuming memory chips, storage, and related components at a pace that has completely warped the supply chain for consumer electronics. What's new is the growing consensus that this isn't a temporary spike. It's a structural shift in who gets priority access to silicon, and gaming hardware is losing that fight.

I've been building PCs since the 360 era, and I've sat through GPU shortages, crypto mining droughts, and pandemic-era scalping. This feels different because there's no obvious correction on the horizon. GPU miners eventually moved on. Pandemic supply chains eventually recovered. AI demand, by contrast, is accelerating. A class action lawsuit filed against Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology accuses the three largest RAM manufacturers of colluding to artificially inflate prices, but even if that case succeeds, legal timelines move far slower than component costs.

For Valve specifically, the Steam Machine's $1,049 to $1,428 price range already puts it out of reach for a huge portion of the audience that made the Steam Deck a hit. Valve told Bloomberg it doesn't measure the Steam Machine's success in raw sales figures, framing it instead as a way to bring open-source PC gaming into living rooms. "We suspect that the Steam Machine is a really good way to solve a very real problem that people have," Aldehayyat said. "If that's borne out to be true, from our opinion, it's a success." I respect the philosophy, but a device that costs over a thousand dollars and might get more expensive isn't solving an accessibility problem.

If you're waiting for prices to drop before upgrading your PC or picking up a Steam Machine, Valve just told you the timeline: the pain you see today is three to six months old. The current pain hasn't arrived yet.