People started noticing last week that the Steam Deck was becoming impossible to buy. Valve declined to comment on the situation at the time but has now updated the PC gaming handheld’s store page to note that, yes, the Steam Deck is currently out of stock and will remain that way from time to time for the foreseeable future due to the AI-fueled memory crisis currently threatening every piece of the economy that relies on computers to run.
“Note: Steam Deck OLED may be out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages,” reads the new disclaimer. “Steam Deck LCD 256GB is no longer in production, and once sold out will no longer be available.”
Valve still hasn’t offered any clearer sense of when the $550 Steam Deck OLED will be back in stock or if the price will be going up. The company put the original $400 Steam Deck LCD model on sale last fall until inventory sold out at which point it was discontinued. Arguably the best bang-for-your-buck PC gaming handheld is now just completely unavailable in some regions just two years after the latest version of it launched.
It’s the latest victim of the AI arms race in which “hyperscale” companies are investing hundreds of billions in building out data centers in order to supply compute for running models like ChatGPT and Claude Code to churn out everything from meme slop to finished app projects. No one quite knows where it’s all headed outside of promises that one lucky AI company will either create God or pop a 2008-style financial bubble in the process.
In the meantime, markets that rely on affordable memory, like consumer electronics generally and gaming in particular, are getting completely hammered. Sony is reportedly considering delaying the PS6 until 2029, the Nintendo is probably going to have to raise the price of the Switch 2 just a year after it launched, and developers behind new blockbusters are already scrambling to optimize their games for PC so players won’t need to spend an extra $200 upgrading to 32GB of RAM in order to play them when they come out.
And of course all of Valve’s own hardware is currently in purgatory. With a new Steam Deck still a long ways off, the Half-Life company’s focus for 2026 was a new compact gaming PC aimed squarely at living room gamers. Valve was supposed to reveal the price and release date by now but had to push the pre-orders back as it figures out how to source a rapidly dwindling supply of affordable PC components. I’m assured it’s all for a good cause.
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