If you’ve been hovering over the “add to cart” button for a Steam Deck OLED and noticed the buy button has quietly vanished, you’re not imagining it. Valve’s handheld PC is getting caught in the crossfire of the global RAM crisis, and the company is now openly warning that the Steam Deck OLED will be “intermittently” out of stock in some regions because it literally can’t get enough memory and storage chips to keep production flowing smoothly.

On paper, this sounds like a boring supply-chain footnote: components are scarce, products slip in and out of stock, life goes on. In reality, what’s happening to the Steam Deck OLED is a neat little microcosm of a much bigger story. Memory chips — the DRAM and NAND that sit inside everything from AI servers to game consoles — have become the new bottleneck of the tech industry. And unlike the pandemic-era chip shortage, this crunch is being driven less by everyone buying laptops and consoles, and more by an AI arms race that’s swallowing an enormous share of the world’s memory production.

Valve quietly updated the Steam Deck OLED product page to add a short but telling disclaimer: the device “may be out of stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” If you’ve checked the store lately, that line suddenly explains a lot — the handheld has been sold out in the US and other markets for several days, with no neat little “ships in X weeks” badge to comfort people on the fence. The company isn’t saying the Deck is dead or going away; it’s saying that the flow of units will be choppy, depending entirely on when Valve can secure enough RAM and SSD modules to build them.​

This isn’t happening in isolation. Earlier this month, Valve also punted its next wave of PC hardware — the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and a new Steam Controller — out of their early 2026 window, explicitly citing the same memory and storage crunch. In a post to its news page, the company basically admitted it doesn’t feel confident picking final prices and release dates when key components are volatile, warning that “circumstances around both of those things can change” too quickly right now. Valve still wants to ship that hardware in the first half of 2026, but the subtext is clear: until memory supply stabilizes, it’s guessing like everyone else.

Zoom out from Valve’s corner of PC gaming and the pattern is everywhere. Sony and Nintendo are reportedly reworking their console roadmaps because of RAM. Multiple reports suggest Sony is now considering pushing its next PlayStation — widely assumed to be the PlayStation 6 — out to 2028 or even 2029, partly because the kind of high-speed memory it wants is expensive and hard to lock in at scale. Nintendo, meanwhile, is said to be eyeing a price bump for the already-announced Switch 2, which is currently targeting a $450 price tag, to help offset the higher cost of RAM.

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Even outside gaming, smaller, lower-margin players are flinching. Raspberry Pi has already raised prices twice in a matter of months, specifically blaming rising RAM costs and “memory shortages” that have pushed component prices up so far that boards with more RAM need steep increases just to remain viable. The latest hikes add another $10 to 2GB models, $15 to 4GB, $30 to 8GB, and $60 to 16GB configurations, on top of earlier increases. For a platform that built its identity around ultra‑cheap computing, that’s a huge shift — and another sign that memory has become the part no one can treat as a commodity anymore.

So what changed? In short: AI. The same HBM and high-density DRAM stacks that power NVIDIA’s and others’ AI accelerators have turned into a black hole for memory supply. Large data centers are now on track to consume around 70 percent of all memory chips produced in 2026, according to industry analysis, leaving far less slack for consumer devices, PCs, and embedded boards. Market researchers like IDC expect DRAM and NAND supply growth this year to stay below historical norms, even as demand runs hot, which is a gentle way of saying “there’s not enough to go around.” One market breakdown estimates that DRAM prices surged as much as 60 percent in 2025 and could jump another 30 to 40 percent in 2026, with some server-grade parts seeing near‑doubling in spot prices.

When the world’s biggest cloud companies place multi‑year orders and effectively pre‑buy the next couple of years of high‑end memory output, the knock‑on effects are pretty predictable. Memory makers have publicly hinted they can only meet “half to two‑thirds” of demand from their biggest AI customers even while running flat out, which leaves consumer‑grade products fighting over what’s left. That’s where something like the Steam Deck OLED gets squeezed. Valve doesn’t need exotic HBM, but it does need a reliable pipeline of mainstream DRAM and NAND for its handheld. Those parts are now more expensive and less predictable, and that forces hard choices about how many units to build and how aggressively to price them.​

There’s also a quieter but important side effect: older memory types are becoming weirdly scarce. As chipmakers allocate more lines to newer DDR5 and other high‑margin products, legacy DDR4 and older flash parts are dropping into what one analysis called a “historic shortage,” with inventories shrinking from over 13 weeks of stock to just 2–4 weeks for some components. That matters because a lot of cheaper boards, gadgets, and even peripherals still rely on those older standards. If you’re a company like Valve that carefully balanced the Steam Deck OLED’s bill of materials to hit a particular price point, a sudden jump in RAM or SSD prices can break the entire equation.​

PCs are already feeling it. Analysts expect average computer prices to climb by up to 8 percent in 2026 on memory costs alone, and some major OEMs are warning of 15–20 percent price hikes in the second half of the year as they pass RAM and SSD increases through to customers. A separate explainer on the “RAMaggedon” trend notes that the same shortage is also hitting graphics cards, where GDDR6 and next‑gen GDDR7 prices have more than tripled per gigabit over just six months, with obvious implications for gaming laptops and desktops. If your GPU, your RAM, and your SSD all cost more, you either raise your prices or quietly start cutting specs.

Against that backdrop, Valve’s language starts to make sense. Rather than suddenly jacking up prices or silently swapping components, the company is signaling that availability will ebb and flow while it works through a volatile market. It has already retired the mid‑tier 256GB LCD Steam Deck model, which it confirmed it no longer produces, and is concentrating on the newer OLED lineup instead. In a way, the Deck becomes a kind of “burst” product: when memory allocations line up, stock appears; when they don’t, the store goes quiet.​

For players, the practical impact is straightforward but annoying. If you want a Steam Deck OLED this year, treating it like a permanently in‑stock gadget is probably optimistic. You’re more likely to be dealing with drops: inventory appearing briefly in certain regions, then vanishing again as the latest batch sells out and Valve waits on fresh memory and storage. That doesn’t mean the handheld is doomed. It does mean you may need to sign up for stock alerts, watch Valve’s announcements a little more closely, or be ready to jump quickly when your preferred configuration appears.​

You’re also going to see this same story play out across the rest of gaming hardware. A delayed next‑gen PlayStation, a pricier Switch 2, intermittent handheld stock, and rising PC build costs are all symptoms of the same underlying constraint: a finite number of memory wafers, being pulled in one direction by AI build‑outs and in the other by consumer devices. In the short term, that means higher prices, fewer deals, and more “out of stock” messages than anyone wants to see. In the longer term, the hope is that new fabs, expanded capacity, and a slightly calmer AI spending cycle bring things back into balance — but even optimistic forecasts expect tight conditions through 2026 and into 2027.

For now, the Steam Deck OLED is an early, very visible casualty of this memory land grab. It’s a reminder that even in 2026, when consoles and handheld PCs feel like mature, well‑oiled products, they’re still at the mercy of the same silicon pipelines feeding the biggest AI supercomputers on the planet.