Valve hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat told Bloomberg last week that the retail price tags on memory, SSDs, and finished PCs are trailing the wholesale market by three to six months—and that the underlying supply picture is still deteriorating. His warning upends the assumption that waiting for a deal on a new Windows gaming rig, a RAM upgrade, or even a business workstation will eventually pay off. If Aldehayyat is right, today’s expensive components may actually be comparatively cheap.

“Honestly, It’s Still Getting Worse”

In a wide-ranging interview published by PC Gamer, Aldehayyat pulled no punches. “Honestly, it’s still getting worse,” he said. “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.”

Valve co-engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed that the memory crisis is directly crimping output of the company’s newly launched Steam Machine. “We’re basically building everything we can. We’re limited by memory capacity, for sure,” Griffais explained. The Steam Machine arrived on June 29, 2026, at a starting price of $1,049, entering a market in which neither DRAM nor NAND flash costs are behaving the way consumer electronics manufacturers would like.

Those comments land against a backdrop of already grim projections. Earlier this month, PC Gamer reported on research showing that memory prices are expected to rise sharply until at least 2027, with no meaningful reductions forecast until 2028. The Steam Machine’s launch price, then, may not represent the peak.

What This Means for PC Builders, Gamers, and IT Buyers

For anyone shopping for a Windows PC or components in the next six months, Aldehayyat’s timeline has concrete implications.

Home users and gamers: If you’ve been holding out for a drop in RAM or SSD prices, the engineer’s warning suggests that patience will be punished, not rewarded. A 32 GB DDR5 kit that costs $90 today could easily become $110–$130 by early 2027. Prebuilt systems pose their own peril: manufacturers may quietly switch to single-channel memory, slower NVMe drives, or smaller capacities while keeping the sticker price steady. That gaming desktop advertised at $1,199 might actually ship with a weaker spec than the one reviewed last month.

IT administrators and enterprise buyers: Workstation refreshes, VDI deployments, and any rollouts that hinge on memory‑heavy configurations face an immediate cost headwind. Negotiated contracts will start reflecting higher component costs sooner than retail shelves. A batch of 64 GB engineering workstations ordered now could be thousands of dollars cheaper than an identical batch ordered in November. For businesses that postponed refreshes during the earlier economic uncertainty, the window to act before the full brunt of wholesale increases hits may be closing.

Laptop and handheld shoppers: Soldered memory becomes an even bigger gamble. A notebook with 16 GB of non‑upgradeable RAM might be adequate today but could become a constraint sooner than expected—and swapping the whole machine later will be far more expensive than simply adding a DIMM. Prioritize 32 GB configurations if your budget allows, even if the upfront premium stings.

How AI’s Insatiable Appetite Created This Shortage

The memory squeeze isn’t a mere hangover from pandemic‑era supply shocks. It is being driven, in large part, by the compute‑hungry AI boom—and that structural demand makes this crisis different from previous cycles.

Training and running large language models, diffusion models, and real‑time inference services requires enormous quantities of high‑bandwidth memory (HBM) and high‑density DDR5. Memory fabricators, faced with fat margins from cloud providers and AI startups, are prioritizing HBM capacity over conventional DRAM and NAND. The same factory that could be churning out DDR5 DIMMs for your next gaming PC is instead stacking HBM dies for a data‑center accelerator.

That pressure cascades. NAND flash, used in SSDs, is also being pulled into AI storage architectures, tightening supply for consumer drives. And because semiconductor fabrication lines cannot be rebalanced overnight—new capacity takes years and billions of dollars to bring online—the shortage isn’t a blip. AI inference, in particular, requires persistent, always‑on memory resources, meaning demand won’t evaporate after a one‑time infrastructure build‑out.

Valve’s own Steam Machine production illustrates the bottleneck. Despite strong initial sales—unconfirmed external estimates put shipments at 10,000 to 15,000 units per week, according to multiple outlets—the company can’t build as fast as it could if memory were abundant. For Windows PC buyers, the same dynamic means fewer choices, higher prices, and more creative spec manipulation by manufacturers trying to protect margins.

Your Strategy: Don’t Panic, But Act Decisively

No one should rush into a bad purchase, but the old playbook of waiting for prices to fall needs a rewrite. Here’s how to navigate the next three to six months.

  • Audit your real needs. For gaming at 1440p or basic productivity, 32 GB of DDR5 is the new sweet spot. Content creators, developers, and power users should target 64 GB or more. Don’t buy capacity you won’t use, but also don’t hobble a new build with the bare minimum.
  • Shop for full‑featured systems now. If a prebuilt or laptop meets your requirements, locking in today’s price may save money compared to a future model with a similar (or worse) spec. Pay careful attention to whether memory runs in dual‑channel, the SSD is a modern NVMe drive, and the enclosure allows future upgrades.
  • Prioritize upgradeability. A standard ATX desktop with DIMM slots and multiple M.2 sockets gives you flexibility to add capacity later, should prices eventually ease. Soldered or proprietary parts trap you with today’s configuration.
  • Inspect enterprise purchase schedules. Hardware refresh cycles that are already planned for the next two quarters should be reviewed immediately. The cost of delaying a workstation order for three months could outweigh any hoped‑for discount.
  • Look for hidden cuts. When price increases seem absent, they often hide in plain sight: a 1 TB SSD becomes 512 GB, dual‑rank memory becomes single‑rank, or a Thunderbolt port quietly disappears. Always compare specs, not just model numbers.
  • Consider alternatives—carefully. Game streaming services can postpone a local PC purchase if you already have a capable client, but subscription costs and latency trade‑offs remain real. Upgrading just a GPU while keeping a sufficient RAM kit may also extend an existing build’s life, but only if your processor isn’t already a bottleneck.

What to Watch in the Coming Months

Several signals will tell you whether the warning is being borne out—or whether the market finds an unexpected way to cool.

Valve’s pricing. If the $1,049 Steam Machine holds steady through the 2026 holiday season, that indicates Valve is absorbing cost increases or has locked in favorable contracts. A price hike, on the other hand, would be a smoking gun for the broader memory market.

Holiday system configurations. Pay less attention to the headline price of that Black Friday gaming laptop and more to whether it still offers 32 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD. Downgraded specs at a “discount” are a tell that component costs are biting.

DRAM and NAND contract prices. Trade publications track the wholesale contracts that precede retail changes. Sustained quarterly increases are a leading indicator that store shelves will follow.

AI infrastructure spending. If cloud providers throttle back their data‑center build‑out, memory supply could gradually shift back toward consumer products. But even a slowdown in orders wouldn’t immediately translate into cheaper DIMMs; the pipeline is long, and fabricators are wary of over‑correcting.

Aldehayyat’s warning isn’t a call to panic—it’s a call to stop assuming the old rules still apply. For the Windows PC community, that means treating today’s hardware not as the expensive peak of a temporary cycle, but as a benchmark that may look like a bargain six months from now.