As if it wasn't hard enough to build a gaming PC already, a reliable insider has claimed that Nvidia and AMD are both looking to "significantly" increase the price of GPUs this year.
Over the past few years, gaming has become much more expensive as a hobby, with the prices of both consoles and games themselves rising as production costs increase. 2025 is when the dam really broke, though, as the cost of pretty much everything started to skyrocket, from the Switch 2 and its physical releases to the depressing arrival of $80 games.
Console gaming has been hit hard over the past few months, but it's especially noticeable for PC users, as GPUs, RAM, memory, and storage have all started to become much more expensive, largely because of the emergence and investment in AI. As if it wasn't bad enough, a new report claims that AMD and Nvidia are going to "significantly" raise GPU prices throughout the coming year.
GPU Prices Could Start To Rise Again As Early As This Month
Expect Costs To Keep Increasing Throughout 2026
As pointed out by Eurogamer, this report comes courtesy of Newsis, which recently reported that both Nvidia and AMD are looking to increase the price of GPUs in 2026. According to the report, Nvidia and AMD are planning to start a "gradual price adjustment" over the next few months, with AMD hiking prices as early as this month and Nvidia apparently starting in February.
The increased prices are reportedly going to hit consumer GPUs first, including Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50 and AMD's Radeon RX 9000. Newsis points out that the RTX 5090, which released for $1,999 at the start of 2025, could end up costing as much as $5,000 due to the price hike, which is a frankly ridiculous price point that'll stop a majority of gamers from being able to afford the hardware.
Things have gotten so bad that a PS5 is currently less expensive to purchase than 64GB of DDR5 RAM. Hope the AI videos of Family Guy were worth it, guys.
Of course, the price increases shouldn't come as much of a surprise considering everything that's been going on over the past few months. GPUs are already more expensive due to how powerful they're getting, but the rise of generative AI has placed more importance on the technology than ever before, making consumer GPUs much harder to acquire since the demand is so high across the board.
As if paying five grand for a RTX 5090 wasn't bad enough, it's very likely that these price hikes are only going to get worse in the future, especially as Xbox and PlayStation both look to introduce new generations of hardware. AI has already made the world a worse place in most regards, but it's having an especially noticeable impact on gaming before 2026 has even really kicked off.
If You're Waiting For More Fallout Games, It's Time To Expand Your Horizons
After the success of the Fallout TV show's second season, many people are looking for a new game. Guess what: it's already available.