Following the departure of now-former NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, a new report by The Wall Street Journal (via Wccftech) has emerged alleging that NVIDIA artificially inflated the ongoing GPU and memory shortage by investing in AI startups that would go on to buy NVIDIA GPUs and build data centers. The reason behind this was to maintain the perception of ongoing high demand and to move an oversupply of semiconductors from TSMC.

The WSJ report cites an August meeting between Huang and his senior finance team, including NVIDIA's CFO and acting CEO, Colette Kress, during which Kress pushed for a reduction in circular financing agreements, in response to which Huang allegedly lay into Kress, calling her a "deer in the headlights," after she had pushed to scale back NVIDIA's $250 billion deal with OpenAI. Jensen's push for further investment into small-scale cloud providers was seemingly in response to the changing tide that saw AI hyperscalers move away from off-the-shelf components in favor of custom solutions.

Nintendo isn't considering another price increase for the Switch 2, at least for now. Speaking at the company's financial results briefing on November 5, president Shuntaro Furukawa said there hasn't been any major change in the memory situation and that Nintendo is still able to secure "sufficient quantities," according to Reuters. That's welcome news for anyone still on the fence, since the console has already gone up once this year. Nintendo announced a $50 price hike back in May, which took the US price from $449.99 to $499.99 on September 1, while the Japanese model went from ¥49,980 to ¥59,980 and the European My Nintendo Store price climbed from €469.99 to €499.99.

The comments seem to arrive as Switch 2 hardware sales are slowing down. Nintendo shipped 2.67 million units between July and September, down 41% from a year earlier, though the console has now reached 26.35 million units overall and is still ahead of where the original Switch was at the same point. Nintendo has kept its forecast of 16.5 million Switch 2 units for the fiscal year ending March 2027. Of course, "not considering" isn't the same as a promise, so it's best not to treat this as a price freeze. Sony said much the same thing this week, noting that it has already agreed on memory volumes with suppliers for its next fiscal year. Elsewhere, hardware keeps getting pricier, with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50-series reportedly set for price hikes of up to $500, but at least Nintendo is staying put for now.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks the DRAM sitting inside personal computers would be better used in data centers. He made the comments on the Cheeky Pint podcast, hosted by Stripe co-founder John Collison, in an episode released on October 29. The two were discussing the memory supply chain when the topic turned to local inference, meaning running AI models on your own hardware instead of the cloud. Here's what Altman said, at roughly the 29-minute mark:

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEOA lot of people want local inference. And somehow, they assume that the problem is solved now. Because, we are going to have open-source models. We're going to be able to run them on our computers. And so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data center. But from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer. And, being used 5% of the time. You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow everyone's... many people's intuition is the opposite of that.

Worldwide PC shipments fell a steep 20.1% year over year in Q3 2026 to 62.7 million units, according to preliminary data from IDC, down from 78.5 million in the same quarter last year. It is the second straight quarterly decline, and a much deeper one than Q2, which IDC now lists as a 3.8% drop. Shipments also slipped 9.1% compared to Q2, even though Q3 is normally the bigger quarter. IDC puts this down to the first half of the year, when vendors and channels stocked up ahead of memory-driven price hikes. That pulled volume out of the second half, and with supply still constrained and prices high, Q3 apparently had little demand left to work with.

The three largest vendors took the hardest hits. HP shipments dropped 30.9% to 10.3 million units, Dell fell 25% to 7.6 million, and Lenovo, still first with a 23.8% share, was down 22.6% to 14.9 million. Together they gave up 4.2 points of market share. Apple and ASUS also shipped fewer PCs, down 11.3% and 8.6%. However, both fell slower than the market and ended up with a larger share, at 9.5% and 8.7%.

When Valve announced the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and updated Steam Controller late in 2025, it did not reveal pricing, but the gaming giant said that the hardware would launch in early 2026. That launch window is still on the cards, but according to a recent announcement by Valve, it is still unable to announce pricing or specific launch dates for any of the hardware. As the announcement explains, "the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame)."

The Steam hardware is hardly the only hardware launch said to be affected by the current memory crisis, with even laptops and potentially the upcoming console generation rumored to see delays as a result of the RAM shortage caused by the AI boom. For Valve's part, the company promises that the actual release dates have not been affected, but it just needs to find a concrete launch price that makes sense. That could mean that the Steam Machine will launch at higher prices than the $700-800 initially predicted by many. Valve has previously said that the Steam Machine would be priced more like a PC than a console, meaning the prospective price increase will still likely be in line with what you'd expect from a similarly equipped PC. Valve also demystified some other aspects of the upcoming Steam hardware, confirming once again that the Steam Machine is able to reach 4K 60 FPS with FSR enabled, although the team admits that some games may need to be upscaled from 1080p with VRR enabled in order to guarantee a smooth gameplay experience. Valve also confirmed that it plans to make CAD files and specs available for the Steam Machine's faceplate so that gamers and third-party manufacturers can build accessories for the PC. Both the SSD and memory will also be upgradeable and easily accessible.

DDR4 RAM prices are apparently starting to show the ongoing effects of the current DRAM shortage. According to a recent analysis by Goldman Sachs (via Ctee), DDR4 spot prices are as much as 172% higher than contract prices. This suggests that demand for DDR4 is driving up prices for the older memory standard. The Ctee report also cites dramatic increases in DRAM exports out of Korea—up 72% year-over-year—and a 445% increase in Nayanke's annual revenue growth, primarily driven by DDR4 price increases. This drastic increase in DDR4 prices is also visible in regular consumer channels as well. In the last six months along, the price of a 32 GB kit of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 memory has increased from a low of $71.99 to $262.99.

There are a few reasons for the unexpected price increases for DDR4 RAM are likely due to do buyers instead opting for DDR4 instead of DDR5, in light of the news of the shortage caused by the AI industry's outsized demand for memory. This is a move that many saw coming, with ASUS announcing earlier in 2026 that it would be increasing its DDR4 motherboard production heading into the new year, explaining that it expected high DDR5 prices and low supply to continue.