As the price of RAM, GPUs, and even SSDs climbs ever higher off the back of AI data centre demand, it’s causing a significant price crunch for hardware manufacturers. “It is such a volatile situation at this point in time it is hard to figure out pricing,” Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said in a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast. “I don’t know if I can pick a number right now as I speak with you and [be confident in it] by the end of the podcast.”
The rapidly increasing prices mean the company are keeping schtum on how much their next round of gaming laptops will cost. “This is something that concerns me,” Tan explained. “The RAM prices are going up and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and in the reach of gamers out there.”
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom during the CES podcast recording.
When asked if component prices could hit a level that would force Razer out of the gaming laptop business, Tan said he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. “We’ve seen this happen with the industry multiple times in the past – spikes in pricing. As long as manufacturing kicks in, and we’re able to keep up, it’s just economics at the end of the day. There is a spike in terms of pricing, we believe that it will come down. What goes up must come down and what goes down goes up too.”
So, if you can, even Razer CEO seems to be advising holding off on buying that new gaming laptop for now.
Not that Razer showed off any new gaming laptops at CES this month. Instead, they announced Project Motoko, a pair of camera-fitted, AI-powered headphones that creepily analyse your surroundings as you go about your life, and Project Ava, a holographic AI companion who lives in a tube on your desk and tells you you’re looking great, like a sycophantic Zordon – one for the Power Rangers fans out there. All of which was par for the course, when it comes to this year’s AI-seduced trade show.
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Razer are far from alone in feeling the pinch of rising component costs. We have seen significant price jumps in components since Valve revealed the Steam Machine last November. As James found, even trying to make an estimate of how much Valve’s living room PC could cost is a headache. The mini PC is due for release in early 2026, but there is still no hint of a price – only that Valve won’t be eating any of the cost, as console manufacturers do.
And it’s not only hardware makers that are feeling the pinch. The shortages are impacting game developers, too, with Larian revealing they’re optimising the early access release of Divinity to account for lower-end PCs. Traditionally, they would make these optimisations later in the game’s development.
If you absolutely must buy a new graphics card, though, James was impressed by AMD Radeon’s RX 9070 XT. While the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti is better at ray tracing, the two GPUs otherwise perform pretty much evenly, despite the $720 Radeon being significantly cheaper than its $900 GeForce rival. Still, maybe hold off a tad longer if you can.
