Computers and their graphics processing units are becoming hot commodities, and prices seem poised to get worse, not better.
Demand for processors is set to affect everything from gaming to run-of-the-mill memory sticks, resulting in a pincer attack on consumer wallets.
‘AI demand is driving up the price.’
Blaze Media’s Auron MacIntyre noted a recent price spike in handheld gaming device Steam Deck; a product that has been on the market for about four years increased in price by $300 in May.
“Over the entire history of video games, systems went down in price as they get older,” MacIntyre wrote on X. “You might say ‘who cares it’s a child’s toy’ and fair enough but it’s a signal of a wider trend[.] The price is skyrocketing because AI demand is driving up the price on all physical computing hardware from video processors to RAM.”
The culprits in the processor gold rush are tech and AI companies buying up GPUs — which are typically used in phones, laptops, and gaming consoles — to power their data centers.
Just a few years ago, a few thousand GPUs in a single facility was considered cutting edge. Now, upwards of 100,000 GPUs are “interconnected through high-speed networking systems designed to operate as a single computational unit” inside one building, according to DataCenters.com.
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While the mind may imagine an all-powerful energy source or an unseen technology at the core of these sprawling data centers, photos inside the facilities show they are quite literally thousands of computers plugged into each other, powering the demands of search engines and AI agents.
The writing has been on the wall since at least 2024; Microsoft bought 485,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs that year. Meta bought an estimated 224,000, ByteDance bought around 230,000, and xAI purchased 200,000 (per Data Center Dynamics).
Last November, Tech Powerup noted official “warnings” from manufacturers that price hikes would be unfolding as memory costs rose over 170% year-over-year.
This prediction turned out to be accurate as GPU pricing has risen between 5% to 20% or more, according to Fusion Worldwide. The outlet notes shortages in high bandwidth memory, graphics double data rate, and dynamic random-access memory.
This has led to product lead times of an additional three to seven months.
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Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
Consumers may be well served to hoard some GPUs for themselves too. The demand is not only making prices increase, but depreciation is slower as well.
Business Insider recently cited a company selling refurbished GPUs that said in the second year of a processor’s life, it only loses 15 cents on the dollar. In its third year, the same GPU is only losing one additional cent and can be sold for 84 cents on the dollar.
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