It's no secret that prices for electronics are skyrocketing across the board, and shortly after it seemed as though there may be some hope on the horizon, it has been revealed by VideoCardz that the ASUS AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPUs have seen a significant price increase in US markets. All three ASUS RX 9070 XT models listed on PCPartPicker have seen a substantial price increase in recent days, with the average increase coming out to around 17%.

The ASUS Prime OC Radeon RX 9070 XT saw its price go from $819.99 to $959.95 at both B&H and ASUS's own online store. It currently retails for the same $959.95 at Amazon, too. Similarly, the black version of the Prime OC RX 9070 XT and the ASUS TUF Gaming OC Radeon RX9070 XT have increased from $799.99 to $939.99 and $849.99 to $989.99, respectively. Curiously, the ASUS Prime OC RX 9070 XT can still be had at Newegg and Amazon for its lower $799.99 price, suggesting that this is effectively a pricing change that was implemented by ASUS when new GPUs were sent out to retailers.

OpenAI and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced a multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate AI innovation for enterprises, startups, and end consumers around the world. Amazon will also invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met.

Partnering to bring new advanced AI capabilities to enterprises worldwide
OpenAI and Amazon are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI's models, which will be available through Amazon Bedrock.
Stateful developer environments are the next generation of how frontier models will be used, seamlessly enabling models to access elements like compute, memory, and identity. A Stateful Runtime Environment allows developers to keep context, remember prior work, work across software tools and data sources, and access compute. They're designed to handle ongoing projects and workflows.

It has been leaked on multiple occasions that Ubisoft is working on an Assassin's Creed Black Flag remake, and the game was said to be as soon as March 2026, although this was called into question when Ubisoft cancelled and delayed a slew of games earlier in 2026 over concerns of quality. Assassin's Creed Black Flag was thought to be pushed back as well, but a new Amazon listing suggests that this may not be the case.

An Amazon listing for a hardcover Assassin's Creed Black Flag Remake art book by Ubisoft currently shows list pricing of $54.48, with a 25% pre-order discount, but more interestingly, it also lists a release date of March 24, 2026. This is ahead of the previous assumed March 31 launch date for the game itself, so the launch date may just be a placeholder—after all, there is no cover art for the book on the site either—but it may suggest that the Black Flag Remake may still launch towards the end of March.

The GeForce NOW sixth-anniversary festivities roll on this February, continuing a monthlong celebration of NVIDIA's cloud gaming service. This week brings even more reasons to join the party, as GeForce NOW launches on a new platform with support for Amazon Fire TV devices, and eight new games to keep the streaming going strong. The new app brings GeForce NOW directly to select Amazon Fire TV devices, so members can jump into their PC game libraries on the biggest screen in the house using a compatible controller.

The Cloud Turns Up the Heat
GeForce NOW continues to expand access across devices, supporting multiple platforms with the latest additions of Linux. From PCs and Macs to smartphones, browsers and smart TVs, the cloud delivers high-performance gaming to nearly any screen, on more devices than ever. Members tap into GeForce RTX power on the screens they already own, extending the value of their membership without extra hardware or complexity. That reach expands again with the launch of the GeForce NOW app on Amazon Fire TV. GeForce NOW is powering up the living room with the launch of the GeForce NOW app on Amazon Fire TV streaming sticks, leveling up big-screen gaming with PC-quality performance.

After it was announced in October 2025 that Amazon was making a shift away from AAA gaming and had stopped development of new content for New World: Aeternum, we speculated that the game was slowly being sunset. Originally, Amazon said that the game would be supported "through 2026," suggesting that it would not make it long into 2027. A new announcement from Amazon itself on the New World news page has confirmed this theory, stating that New World will officially go offline in January 2027. The post specifies that users will still be able to play New World: Aeternum until January 31, but the game will be delisted from all storefronts on January 15, 2026. As of the time of writing, New World: Aeternum is no longer available for purchase on Steam. Shortly before the aforementioned announcement that no new content would be released for New World, its player count on Steam peaked at an impressive 51,031 players, but that number has since fallen to around 1,200 daily concurrent players.

As part of the shutdown plans, the Nighthaven season will be extended to January 31 as well, effectively sending New World players off with a last hurrah. While all in-game features will remain active until January 31 2027, players will no longer be able to make in-game purchases after July 20, 2026. Amazon encourages players who unwittingly bought New World: Aeternum ahead of the shutdown news to contact support if they would like a refund, although there is no specific cutoff for refunds provided in the announcement. It's likely Steam will stick to its regular rules, which allow automatic refunds as long as players haven't spent more than two hours playing the game or didn't purchase it more than two weeks before the refund request.

The ASUS ROG Harpe Ace Mini Core has officially been listed on Amazon at $49.99, and some of the specifications seem to have changed or been updated since ASUS announced the diminutive lightweight gaming mouse back in October 2025. For starters, the product page now lists the ROG Harpe Ace Mini Core at 52 g, which is 3 g (or 6% heavier than previously claimed), and ASUS has clarified that the ROG Harpe Ace Mini Core has a paracord cable. At the time of writing, the mouse is still temporarily out of stock on Amazon, although it's unclear if there was stock when the product page went live.

In addition to the aforementioned weight increase, ASUS has also revealed that the ROG Harpe Ace Mini Core is compatible with the new ASUS Gear Link web-based driver software that has also been available for the company's latest HE keyboard launches. Another specification that has been clarified is the polling rate, which remains at 1 kHz instead of the 4 kHz and 8 kHz options offered by much of the competition these days. The rest of the mouse's specifications and features remain unchanged, as does the hot-swap switch design.

As cloud workloads continue to grow in complexity and scale, organizations face a persistent challenge: how to simultaneously deliver faster performance, lower costs, and meet sustainability commitments. Traditional approaches often force trade-offs, leaving you to choose between speed and efficiency. To address this need, today we are introducing Graviton5 processors—AWS's most advanced custom chip to date for a broad set of cloud workloads. Graviton5 delivers up to 25% better compute performance than the previous generation while maintaining leading energy efficiency, enabling you to run applications faster, reduce costs, and meet sustainability goals.

Graviton5 delivers measurable business impact
Graviton5-based EC2 M9g instances enable you to process information more efficiently with the highest CPU core density available in Amazon EC2—192 cores in a single package. This efficient design reduces the distance data must travel between cores, cutting inter-core communication latency by up to 33% while increasing bandwidth. Demanding workloads like real-time gaming, high-performance databases, big data analytics, application servers, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) can now scale up with faster data exchange between processing cores.

Samsung is teaming up with Amazon, Bethesda Softworks and Xbox to celebrate the arrival of Fallout Season Two, offering fans more ways to Watch, Experience and Play on Samsung TVs. Watch Season One subscription-free on Samsung TV Plus, experience Season Two in stunning detail on Samsung TVs and play Fallout, including the newest update to the hit game Fallout 76, through the Xbox app on Samsung Gaming Hub. Across streaming, gaming and culture, Fallout comes together on Samsung TVs, creating a single destination for fans to experience the story in full.

WATCH - Stream Prime Video's Fallout Season One Subscription-Free on Samsung TV Plus for a Limited Time
Ahead of the highly anticipated Season Two premiere on Prime Video, fans can return to the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout, from Kilter Films, streaming free on Samsung TV Plus. Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there's almost nothing left to have. Two hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind - and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex and gleefully weird universe waiting for them. The new season will pick up in the aftermath of Season One's epic finale and take audiences along for a journey through the wasteland of the Mojave to the post-apocalyptic city of New Vegas.

In today's cloud-first economy, enterprises are under growing pressure to achieve more with every workload. Cloud infrastructure is no longer just about scalability; it's about aligning technology with business outcomes. That's why AMD and AWS have forged a powerful collaboration that gives customers the freedom to innovate faster, run smarter, and operate more sustainably across the cloud.

At the center of this collaboration is a shared commitment to performance and choice. Together, AMD and AWS are helping organizations optimize cost, scale AI workloads efficiently, and accelerate innovation across industries—from digital services and financial institutions to manufacturers and public sector agencies. With AMD EPYC processor-powered Amazon EC2 instances, customers gain the flexibility and value to tailor their compute infrastructure to their business needs, whether they're modernizing legacy systems, scaling cloud-native applications, or building AI-driven services.

During its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS introduced its latest ASIC chip, Trainium3, designed for internal AI workloads and select external customers. This chip delivers 2.52 PetaFLOPS of FP8 compute per chip and increases on-chip memory capacity to 144 GB of HBM3E, with a memory bandwidth of 4.9 TB/s. Trainium3 supports both dense and expert-parallel model topologies and introduces compact data types, MXFP8 and MXFP4, enhancing the balance between memory and compute for real-time, multimodal, and long-context reasoning tasks. The chip is manufactured using TSMC's N3 3 nm node and is now available in Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServer instances.

Trn3 UltraServers can scale up to 144 Trainium3 chips in a single server, achieving approximately 362 FP8 PetaFLOPS. These servers can be combined into EC2 UltraClusters 3.0 for larger deployments. A fully equipped UltraServer offers about 20.7 TB of HBM3e memory and around 706 TB/s of aggregate memory bandwidth. It also features the NeuronSwitch-v1 fabric, which doubles the interchip interconnect bandwidth compared to the previous UltraServer. AWS reports significant generational improvements, with up to 4.4x higher performance, 3.9x greater memory bandwidth, and about 4x better performance per watt compared to the Trainium2. Additionally, there are notable enhancements in inference and token efficiency for various Amazon services.

At AWS re:Invent, NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services expanded their strategic collaboration with new technology integrations across interconnect technology, cloud infrastructure, open models and physical AI. As part of this expansion, AWS will support NVIDIA NVLink Fusion—a platform for custom AI infrastructure—for deploying its custom-designed silicon, including next-generation Trainium4 chips for inference and agentic AI model training, Graviton CPUs for a broad range of workloads and the Nitro System virtualization infrastructure.

Using NVIDIA NVLink Fusion, AWS will combine NVIDIA NVLink scale-up interconnect and the NVIDIA MGX rack architecture with AWS custom silicon to increase performance and accelerate time to market for its next-generation cloud-scale AI capabilities. AWS is designing Trainium4 to integrate with NVLink and NVIDIA MGX, the first of a multigenerational collaboration between NVIDIA and AWS for NVLink Fusion. AWS has already deployed MGX racks at scale with NVIDIA GPUs. Integrating NVLink Fusion will allow AWS to further simplify deployment and systems management across its platforms.

Amazon has shared new hardware and service details for its Leo satellite network (formerly Project Kuiper) as it gets closer to commercial launch. With more than 150 satellites now in orbit, Amazon is launching an enterprise preview program for select customers ahead of a broader rollout in 2026. The highlight is Leo Ultra, Amazon's new enterprise-grade user terminal. The flat-panel phased-array antenna delivers up to 1 Gbps download and 400 Mbps upload, making it the fastest production terminal Amazon has announced. The unit uses custom Amazon silicon and RF processing to reduce latency and support full-duplex operation. The design has no moving parts and is built to handle extreme weather.

Besides Leo Ultra, Amazon will offer two lower service tiers: Leo Nano uses a compact 7-inch antenna delivering download speeds up to 100 Mbps, while Leo Pro uses a standard 11-inch antenna supporting speeds up to 400 Mbps. Amazon is positioning Leo for organizations that operate beyond the reach of terrestrial connectivity, including industrial, government, and remote operations environments. The service supports network management tools, end-to-end encryption and priority support. It also integrates directly with AWS and other private networks bypassing traffic over the public internet.

SK hynix shared its next-generation AI memory strategy and roadmap at the SK AI Summit 2025 held in Seoul from November 3-4. At the summit held under the theme "AI Now & Next," the company elevated its vision from becoming a full-stack AI memory provider to embracing a broader role as a full-stack AI memory "creator." Hosted annually by SK Group, the event was formerly known as the SK Tech Summit but has evolved with a greater focus on AI to become the SK AI Summit since 2024. This year's event brought together global AI experts and industry professionals to discuss the present and future of AI technologies, as well as its applications across industries.

Among those in attendance were SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung, and SK Telecom CEO Jung Jaihun. They were joined by influential tech leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who delivered keynote speeches via video. Furthermore, global tech giants including NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, TSMC, and Meta, together with numerous domestic members of the K-AI Alliance, participated to discuss collaboration opportunities across the AI ecosystem.

Amazon US sales data for October, courtesy of @TechEpiphanyYT, reveal a huge disparity between AMD and Intel CPU sales. The combined shipments of AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D and 7800X3D reached roughly 16,000 units, while Intel's entire CPU lineup on the platform did not surpass 10,000 units. This gives AMD about 83.80% of the market share in terms of units sold, meaning that for every ten CPUs sold, more than eight were AMD models. The two X3D models sold roughly 8,000 units each, indicating a strong demand for AMD's high-end gaming processors, even at premium prices. In the value segment, the six-core Ryzen 5 5500 sold nearly 5,000 units, securing the third spot and outperforming common Intel alternatives like the Core i3 models, which typically offer four cores.

Intel saw a limited success with the Core Ultra 7 265K, which sold nearly 1,000 units after its price dropped below $300. However, this single product couldn't offset the production challenges Intel faced with its 12th, 13th, and 14th generation lines, where increasing prices have reduced competitiveness in price-sensitive retail markets. Interestingly, the average selling price of AMD CPUs was $272.05, while Intel's was higher at $308.62. This indicates that AMD is focusing more on the low and mid-range segments, whereas Intel's customers are primarily targeting higher-end builds.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI have signed a $38 billion deal spanning several years, seven to be more precise, to boost OpenAI's AI operations using AWS's high-end cloud setup. This agreement lets OpenAI use clusters with hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs, the complete planned capacity is expected to be deployed for use by the end of 2026. These GPUs are set up across Amazon EC2 UltraServers linked by a fast, high-capacity network built to handle both inference and large-scale model training. AWS's previous experience managing clusters exceeding 500,000 chips has been a key factor in OpenAI's decision.

The new infrastructure is expected to serve a range of OpenAI applications, from ChatGPT inference workloads to training next-generation foundation models. OpenAI's move to AWS comes after a series of recent partnerships with NVIDIA, AMD, Microsoft, Broadcom, and Oracle making sure they can tap into a mix of high-end chips and cloud systems. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that the company plans to invest $1.4 trillion to build 30 gigawatts of computing capacity, equivalent to the power consumption of roughly 25 million U.S. households. So far, OpenAI has partnered with NVIDIA for 10 GW, AMD for 6 GW, and Oracle for 4.5 GW of compute capacity, moving steadily toward its stated goal of building a 30 GW AI infrastructure network.

It's no secret that Amazon Games had been working on some version of a Lord of the Rings MMO, although the game had already been cancelled once due to contract disputes, and the second version, which was being worked on in conjunction with Embracer, hasn't been seen or heard from in a while. The recent news of Amazon's mass layoffs shift towards casual games, and specifically away from MMOs and AAA games, raised questions about the future of the Lord of the Rings MMO, however Amazon had—and still hasn't—made an official proclamation regarding the game's demise.

Ashley Amrine, a software engineer affected by those Amazon Gaming layoffs has more or less confirmed, in a now-deleted LinkedIn post (via Rock Paper Shotgun), that the Lord of the Rings MMO has seemingly been cancelled. In her post addressing the fact that she had been laid off, Ashleigh Amrine, a former engineer at Amazon Games, wrote: "This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y'all would have loved it)." Her revelation suggests that it would still have been a while before the new MMO launched, but it was previously described as "open-world MMO adventure in a persistent world set in Middle-earth, featuring the beloved stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings literary trilogy" when it was first announced. The team working on the game was the same one that had been responsible for New World, which, despite its hiccups, seemed to have largely been a success, managing to hold onto a fairly impressive ~35,000 daily players on Steam alone.

It was only just revealed that Amazon Games appears to be slowly sunsetting New World: Aeternum, with the most recent content update officially revealed as the last in the game's four-year post-launch development cycle, and the servers for the MMO only guaranteed to be maintained and online "through 2026." However, the latest wave of layoffs at Amazon, which are slated to affect at least 14,000 workers, seemingly mean that New World won't be the only premium Amazon Games experience to get the cut. Amazon's VP of games, Steve Boom explains that Amazon has "made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work - specifically around MMOs - within Amazon Game Studios."

Reporting on the layoffs, Variety managed to get hold of an internal memo that details a marked shift in Amazon Games's approach. Most notably, the internal memo confirms that Amazon will be diverting development resources away from AAA games, instead focusing on the Amazon Luna cloud gaming subscription service included with Amazon Prime, and its casual party and AI-powered games, like the somewhat peculiar Courtroom Chaos - Starring Snoop Dogg. Amazon will supposedly continue to work on existing AAA projects with external studios, but that is likely only to fulfill contractual obligations to do so and not because Amazon is invested in making AAA games.

New World: Aeternum (formerly just New World) launched four years ago, leaving a trail of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPUs in its wake, and the MMO has since grown to around 35,000 active daily players on Steam alone. Unfortunately for those players, that doesn't seem to be enough for Amazon Games, which just announced that "it is no longer sustainable to continue supporting the game with new content updates," indicating that the game would no longer receive any active development. The most recent update, Nighthaven, and the Season 10 content update will be the final update New World: Aeternum, but the game's servers will supposedly remain online "through 2026," indicating the potential complete shutdown of New World after the end of the same year.

It's not all bad news, though: seemingly in preparation for the game's gradual decommissioning, Amazon made the Rise of Angry Earth expansion free for PC players earlier in October. Curiously, Amazon will continue selling New World: Aeternum on all platforms "until further notice," and it will continue to be playable via Sony's PlayStation Plus subscription service. The studio has declined to provide refunds to those who recently purchased the game unaware of the imminent closure. Amazon has also clarified that it will continue to provide bug fixes and server maintenance for New World, presumably until, the game is taken offline completely, although the exact end date for support on that front is unclear. There are also no changes to the availability and use of premium in-game currency in New World: Aeternum.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has just taken down half of the known internet. However, services are now recovering. Just as Monday started on the Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), AWS reported incidents of multiple AWS services being down, with a simple confirmation that "We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region." Online services like Amazon.com, Alexa, ChatGPT, Epic Games Store, Epic Online Services, social media like Snapchat, and games like Fortnite, have been down since.

A few hours later, AWS confirmed that it had isolated the issue. "We have identified a potential root cause for error rates affecting the DynamoDB APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region," they stated, adding, "This issue also impacts other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. Global services or features that rely on US-EAST-1 endpoints, such as IAM updates and DynamoDB Global tables, may also be experiencing issues. During this time, customers may be unable to create or update Support Cases. We recommend customers continue to retry any failed requests." Subsequently, AWS confirmed that the "underlying DNS issue has been fully mitigated, and most AWS service operations are now succeeding normally."

Update 19:45 UTC: AWS is still experiencing some outage, but full recovery is in progress. The team stated "We continue to observe recovery across all AWS services, and instance launches are succeeding across multiple Availability Zones in the US-EAST-1 Regions."

AWS has collaborated with AMD as the first major cloud provider to launch instances powered by AMD EPYC CPUs. Since 2018, AWS has launched all generations of EPYC CPUs spanning general purpose, memory-optimized, compute-optimized, burstable, and HPC instance families. Today we're excited to announce the availability of the latest Amazon EC2 general-purpose instance, M8a, powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors. AMD EPYC CPU-powered M8a is a strong fit for general-purpose applications that need balanced compute, memory, and networking. It is ideal for web and application hosting, microservices architectures, and databases where predictable performance and efficient scaling are important.

"AWS has trusted AMD EPYC processors for every generation of their cloud instances," said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Server Business, AMD. "With 5th Gen EPYC, we're continuing to increase the performance, efficiency, and scalability customers need to power everything from modern applications to the most demanding workloads—helping them innovate faster in the cloud."

Today, we're thrilled to reveal our new Kindle Scribe lineup, reimagined for productivity: Our next-generation Kindle Scribe with and without a front light, and the first-ever color Kindle Scribe.

The new Kindle Scribe has a beautiful new design that's just like paper—it's ultra-thin at 5.4 mm, ultra-light at 400 g, and 40% faster for writing and page turns. The larger 11-inch glare-free display mirrors the proportions of a sheet of paper and feels just like you're writing on one—it's the perfect size for reviewing full-sized documents, feels natural for notetaking, and is easy to take with you wherever you go.

IO Interactive, the award-winning developer and publisher behind the globally-acclaimed HITMAN franchise, and Amazon MGM Studios today shared the first gameplay deep dive of 007 First Light during an exclusive Sony PlayStation State of Play. Players were introduced to the first footage of the standalone original, re-imagined origin story of James Bond, allowing them to see the aspiring spy in action. 007 First Light also revealed its launch date, set to release on March 27, 2026, on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC, and is available for pre-order starting today. Additionally, players who pre-order 007 First Light will get upgraded to the 007 First Light - Deluxe Edition for free, granting a 24-hour Early Access, as well as exclusive in-game skins and outfits.

Patrick Gibson (Dexter: Original Sin, The OA) announced the ensemble cast of voice and motion capture actors for 007 First Light, confirming that he will portray James Bond in the game. Classic 007 characters, such as M (Priyanga Burford), Q (Alastair Mackenzie), and Miss Moneypenny (Kiera Lester), will also feature, alongside new ones, including Bond's mentor, John Greenway (Lennie James - Fear the Walking Dead, Save Me), and Miss Roth (Noemie Nakai).

Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores are now powering the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) R8i and R8I-flex instances, available on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The new instances reflect years of collaboration between Intel and AWS, bringing advanced silicon innovations and tightly integrated software optimizations to customers seeking scalable, cost-efficient and high-performance cloud infrastructure.

"The launch of the 8th Generation EC2 instances powered by Intel Xeon 6 is a milestone in our collaboration with AWS," said Ronak Singhal, senior fellow at Intel. "Together, we've built an infrastructure that accelerates AI, enhances memory performance, and simplifies deployment - helping customers achieve faster insights and stronger ROI."

AMD has reportedly retired the Ryzen 7 5700X3D Socket AM4 desktop processor with 3D V-Cache technology. The 8-core/16-thread chip was launched in January 2024 as a lower priced alternative to the 5800X3D, which AMD retired later that year in October 2024. Towards the end of 2024, the 5700X3D was among the bestselling processors on Amazon. Its retirement sees AMD finally draw the curtains on the Socket AM4 platform. The 5800X3D and 5700X3D, while based on the older "Zen 3" microarchitecture and only supporting the older DDR4 memory standard, offered gaming performance rivaling 12th Gen Core i9-12900K "Alder Lake" or "Zen 4" Ryzen 7600 processors with newer DDR5 memory, giving those on the 8-year-old platform a cost-effective upgrade path.

Intel's high-end "Arrow Lake" processors have just become significantly more affordable, with the Core Ultra 7 265K and 265KF now priced below $250 US at major American retailers. In recent weeks, Intel has officially reduced its suggested retail prices from $399 to $309 and from $384 to $294, and retailers have pushed the savings even further. Today, shoppers can pick up the unlocked Core Ultra 7 265K for $239.99 and the graphics-disabled 265KF for $229.99 at Micro Center, reflecting a roughly 40 percent discount off launch pricing. In addition to these cuts, Micro Center is bundling the 265K with an ASUS Z890 AYW Gaming Wi-Fi motherboard and a 32 GB G.Skill Ripjaws S5 DDR5-6000 memory kit for $499, saving buyers approximately $70 compared to purchasing the components separately. Newegg's deal includes a free 16 GB Patriot Viper Venom DDR5-6400 kit with the 265K, while Amazon's Spring Bundle features two full-price PC games, Dying Light: The Beast and Civilization VII, plus software licenses valued at $159.

Internationally, similar markdowns are appearing across Intel's Arrow Lake-S lineup. In the UK, LambdaTek lists the Core Ultra 9 285 K at £481.18, the 265K at £234.04, and the 265KF at £230.97. The mid-range Core Ultra 5 245 K and 245KF both dip under £220. With their 20 cores and strong multithreaded performance, the Core Ultra 7 265K and 265KF now stand out in the sub-$250 segment, especially when bundled with motherboards, memory, and games. Consumers should balance these productivity gains against expected Arrow Lake gaming results and keep an eye on AMD's upcoming 3D V-Cache processors, which promise to intensify competition in the under-$300 market later this year.