Valve engineers who worked on Steam Machine offered a bleak frontline view of the component shortage squeezing the entire hardware industry. Asked about the AI boom's effect on memory and storage supply, engineer Yazan Aldehayyat didn't sugarcoat it: "Honestly, it's still getting worse. Just in case people are not aware." His colleague Pierre-Loup Griffais added that Valve is "basically building everything we can get our hands on," bluntly conceding, "we're limited by memory capacity, for sure."
The Detail That Should Worry Everyone
The most alarming part of the interview wasn't simply that things are bad, but Aldehayyat's explanation of a lag most consumers don't realise exists. According to Valve's observations, what's currently sitting on retail shelves reflects supply conditions from months ago. "What people are seeing on retail shelves right now, from our observations, is lagging what we're seeing from a bulk supply by at least three to six months," he said.
The already-steep prices consumers are paying today for SSDs, RAM kits, prebuilt PCs, and consoles are based on inventory manufacturers bought before the latest, worse round of cost increases. As that older, cheaper stock gets sold through and replaced with components purchased at today's inflated bulk rates, another wave of price hikes is effectively already locked in and heading for store shelves. In other words, the pain hasn't peaked. It's been delayed. Valve's engineers reportedly indicated prices could climb further by the start of 2027.
Micron's CEO warning of no relief before 2028, to Jefferies forecasting further sharp increases, to PC builders describing this as the first time they've seen "no light at the end of the tunnel." Valve is simply the latest, and one of the most credible, voices confirming the trajectory from the manufacturing side.
How Close the Steam Machine Came to Not Happening
The interview also revealed just how precarious the Steam Machine's launch really was. Valve admitted it had to "negotiate really hard" simply to secure enough memory to build the thing at all, and that at the start of 2026, "things looked really dire," with the company genuinely unsure it would have any units to sell. The device was originally conceived as an entry-level PC, but as we've covered before, spiralling memory and storage costs made that pricing impossible, ultimately landing the Steam Machine at $1,049 for the 512GB model and $1,349 for the 2TB version, well above what Valve wanted.
That context reframes the Steam Machine's constrained, lottery-then-waitlist rollout entirely. The scarcity was never a hype-management tactic. Griffais's admission that Valve is building everything it possibly can, limited purely by memory capacity, makes clear the limited availability is a genuine supply ceiling. Bloomberg reports Valve has sold every unit produced so far, though the company hasn't shared shipment numbers, and notably doesn't measure the device's success by raw sales at all, viewing it instead as providing a viable open-source living-room PC option.
What Happens Next
Valve did offer a sliver of perspective, if not quite optimism. The company suggested the situation could eventually resolve in one of two ways: either component prices fall and hardware costs come back down, or, more soberingly, today's elevated pricing simply becomes the new normal if shortages persist. Which of those outcomes materialises depends entirely on whether memory supply ever catches up with the insatiable demand from AI data centres, and right now nobody in the industry is betting on that happening soon.
Crucially, Valve insists the crisis won't derail its longer-term hardware roadmap, so the Steam Frame and Steam Controller remain on track, and a BIOS update is planned to address a temperature-warning issue on the Steam Machine. But the overall message from the people actually building this hardware is impossible to misread. If you've been holding out for memory and storage prices to fall before upgrading your PC or buying a console, Valve's engineers have a straightforward, unwelcome answer: don't hold your breath, because from where they're standing, it's only getting worse before it gets better.
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