Saturday, October 17th 2026
PS6 RAM and Storage Alone Reportedly Cost Sony Over $680, Claims Leaker
The memory crunch looks like it is hitting the PlayStation 6 harder than expected. Hardware leaker KeplerL2 claims on NeoGAF that the RAM and NAND flash storage in Sony's next console alone cost over $680. He posted it as a reply to a forum member who floated $680 as a possible subsidized retail price, which pretty much puts that idea to rest. Keep in mind that figure covers only memory and storage, before the APU, cooling, power supply, and the rest of the hardware are counted. This is not the first time Kepler has updated his estimate. Back in March, he put the console's bill of materials at around $760, and by July, that had climbed to roughly $960.
Current leaks suggest the PS6 uses GDDR7 memory on a 160-bit bus with support for up to 40 GB, with 30 GB considered the more likely configuration. There have also been reports that Sony looked into cutting memory capacity to keep costs down, and the culprit is the same as everywhere else: AI data centers are soaking up DRAM and NAND supply, which pushes prices up for everyone. Sony has said nothing official about PS6 pricing, so it's reasonable to treat all of this with some caution. That said, if memory prices stay where they are, a PS6 that costs significantly more than the PS5 Pro seems likely, and a $1,000 price tag now looks quite possible.
Source:
KeplerL2 on NeoGAF
Current leaks suggest the PS6 uses GDDR7 memory on a 160-bit bus with support for up to 40 GB, with 30 GB considered the more likely configuration. There have also been reports that Sony looked into cutting memory capacity to keep costs down, and the culprit is the same as everywhere else: AI data centers are soaking up DRAM and NAND supply, which pushes prices up for everyone. Sony has said nothing official about PS6 pricing, so it's reasonable to treat all of this with some caution. That said, if memory prices stay where they are, a PS6 that costs significantly more than the PS5 Pro seems likely, and a $1,000 price tag now looks quite possible.
46 Comments on PS6 RAM and Storage Alone Reportedly Cost Sony Over $680, Claims Leaker
On a side note, consoles have always been expensive since the PS360 era. The PS3 cost as much as a high-end GPU back in the day. The PS4 price was abnormal since that generation of console was initially planned right after the 2008 financial melt-down and were designed to be cheaper.
My guess is that aside from whatever "volume discount" they might get for buying in, well, volume, all these ultra big companies do not get special treatment with regards to price because the memory/storage manufacturers can easily say "take it or leave it" currently, they're not lacking in business opportunities. If Sony won't buy, then Microsoft will. If Microsoft doesn't, then all the other companies will.
Contracts we are literally shipped boxes of ram and SSDs no questions asked RMAs etc.
They aren’t going to Microcenter or Best Buy and buying shelves they buy this by the freight container pallets go to floors and buildings
IMHO, they don't even deserve to be reposted.
And while pricing for manufacturers have obviously increased, that doesn't necessarily mean that manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers have to keep the same (or higher) margins when the demand is greater, when the fact is they are all* making record profits as a result. When it comes to manufacturing the PlayStation, the Xbox, the Switch and the Steam Machine, they already have lower parts cost than retail products, since they don't have to box up every individual part in retail packaging and accessories. Consumers need to hold these companies responsible, as they are just as much greedy as the manufacturers of memory, flash and GPUs.
*) all the big ones at least.Companies tries to negotiate lower prices all the time, that's just regular business. But everything is a headline these days.
If you have to switch from a low volume high margin strategy to a high volume low margin strategy how do you explain to your shareholders and consumers that your premium console wasn't really premium at all and you can now make it for half the cost.You don't need leaks to estimate how much this will cost, 680$ seems about what you'd expect at current prices.
The problem is that, unlike in the past, Sony doesn't want to sell at a loss. They could sell it for $800 for a while until supply improves.
And SSD to 1 TB.
Why?
1. A 40 GB RAM PS6 with a big SSD will be very expensive for Sony to produce!
2. As soon as a successful jailbreak is available for the PS6, it would be an ideal AI Machine that AI customers would WANT to have!
This would drive up prices towards the 3-6K range easisly for the PS6!
3. Good luck Gamers getting a PS6 then!
memory prices will drop and paying a premium for a locked down box while better can be had for less is just dumb.
If you want to achieve a certain task, and you have an optimized LLM for that exact task, that only need that amount of RAM, then a Machine with 128 GB or more RAM would be simply a waste.
By the time this arrives there will be much more suitable machines for that purpose, and there are more and more specialized hardware, which will at some point make these "brute force" LLMs obsolete. Or people realize it's a pointless waste of resources, whichever happens first.
I love how we're discussing hypotheticals about a hypothetical PS6 and its hypothetical $680 memory and storage costs while, in my opinion, much of the collective West is facing a very real economic, industrial and potentially existential crisis. Seriously, guys, I see two things here that I consider borderline pathological.
First, do we even need a PS6 at this time (or a near-future time frame)?
I'm not convinced we need or are getting besides a paper launch another console generation within the next five years, or perhaps even the next decade. The hardware development paradigm has shifted considerably. The same applies to GPUs, memory, storage and gaming hardware in general. Generational improvements are becoming prohibitively expensive, while the practical benefits don't justify the enormous resources required.
And I'm sorry to say this on a computer hardware forum of all places, but perhaps we should temporarily stop obsessing over the next piece of silicon and focus on something considerably more important and that is our economic and industrial survival. We should be squeezing substantially more out of the hardware we already have through software development, optimisation and better utilisation of existing resources. We don't have unlimited time, electricity, energy infrastructure, manufacturing capacity, raw materials or access to critical components anymore. And pretending otherwise won't magically manufacture another million GPUs for us gamers. They all go to military/Ai atm anyways.
Second, I think we're seriously underestimating how fragile our entire technological supply chain has become.
I'm not Michael Pachter with a crystal ball 🔮, and I'm certainly not claiming to know exactly what will happen. But whether we're discussing an RTX 6090, RTX 8090, PS6 or the next Xbox, I genuinely question whether these products will be available in anything resembling the quantities and at the prices we've grown accustomed to over the past decade. We're already dealing with extraordinary pricing pressures, geopolitical fragmentation, energy constraints and increasingly complicated global supply chains. These problems cannot necessarily be resolved by flipping a switch.
Even if international trade and economic relations somehow returned to their pre2019 conditions tomorrow, rebuilding disrupted supply chains, industrial capacity and strategic reserves could still take years. Potentially many years. I'm genuinely concerned that the next decade will be defined less by exciting generational upgrades and more by availability, affordability, repairability and making existing hardware last considerably longer. Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic. I sincerely hope so. But that brings me back to these articles. We're speculating about the hypothetical manufacturing costs of hypothetical hardware in a future market whose conditions we cannot meaningfully predict. That's speculation built on speculation built on speculation.
I see it as a clickbait, nothing more, nothing less.
I would much rather see manufacturers invest their resources into software optimisation, extending hardware lifespans and improving what we already own, rather than endlessly pushing another generation of increasingly expensive products into an increasingly uncertain market. We already have tremendous hardware and thousands of games worth playing. Nobody needs an RTX 8090 or a PS6 to enjoy gaming.
And yes, I realise how ridiculous it sounds to suggest slowing down hardware development on TechPowerUp, especially coming from someone who loves enthusiast hardware as much as I do 😅 But priorities matter. At this point we find ourselves in, we might have to accept that the next great technological achievement isn't necessarily building something faster.
It might simply be learning how to keep what we've already built running. Sorry for my long rant once more, I just got provoked by this article like a prawn (pun intended).
P.S.: Just a little reality check for all of us guys. The RTX 5090 that's suppose to cost 1999USD, I never gotten to buy practically below 3000e, now costs 8000 - 12000 euros. I meam come on. Give it a break System!