- AMD is rumored to be hiking prices for its chips
- Industry insiders in the supply chain indicate that a rise of around 10% will be applied across AMD's "entire chip line"
- This means GPUs and processors, as well as motherboards, and the hike is expected in Q4, so it could happen next month
AMD's processors and graphics cards could soon get more expensive in the latest blow from the RAM crisis rumor mill.
Wccftech spotted that leaker Harukaze5719 highlighted a post from ChannelGate (the Board Channels over in Asia) that cites sources in the supply chain who claim that TSMC has informed its customers of a 10% price rise.
The post observes that most of AMD's chips are manufactured by TSMC, and that Team Red has in turn notified its customers of a 10% "price adjustment" across its "entire chip product line".
That means everything, so on the consumer front, we can expect AMD's GPUs and Ryzen processors to be hit with price increases — and motherboard chipsets are also affected, so the price of those AMD boards will climb, too.
It's worth noting that processors aren't referred to explicitly in the post on the Board Channels, but given the mention of the entirety of AMD's chips, I think we can take that as real (as the leaker Harukaze5719 indicates).
The sources believe that AMD will enforce this new policy in Q4, so it could happen next month, in theory (although all of this remains a rumor).
In other RAM crisis bleakness, the Steam Frame arrived earlier this week with a much-inflated price tag compared to what Valve first envisioned for the VR headset. It starts at $1,059 / £889 / AU$1,609, which is a few hundred more dollars than what Valve was thinking originally.
As PC Gamer reports, a hardware engineer at Valve, Joy Lyons, said, "We set out to design [the Steam Frame] with one particular price in mind, but we've made choices to make sure that we're making a product that is choiceful, that people can purchase. They can upgrade with different features later. But we wanted to make sure we had a base product with really great performance. Then that price target shifted due to the ongoing RAM crisis around the world."
Analysis: a believable enough prediction
Sadly, the AMD rumor is another worrying doom nugget from what seems to be a never-ending supply of bad news in the past couple of months. Just this week, we've had a report that shows DDR5 RAM is somehow getting even more expensive, blowing past the levels I'd expected — not to mention the laptop price hikes.
The RAM crisis was forecast to worsen as 2026 rolled on, and that appears to be unfolding just as predicted — and there's very possibly worse to come in 2027, going by rumors elsewhere. If the pundits, analysts and insiders were right about this year, there's a fair chance they'll be right about next year, too.
Okay, so that's not a foregone conclusion, and some kind of more positive developments could yet happen — we can hope. This particular rumor must also be treated with some caution, as a Board Channels post may not have everything right (by any means), but the problem is that given the current climate, it's believable enough that AMD has price hikes in the works. Team Red already warned us earlier this year about pricing pain for the second half of 2026, after all.
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