AMD CEO predicts ‘higher memory and component costs’ later this year – so brace yourself for Radeon GPU price hikes

AMD has announced its Q1 results with booming revenue driven by AI
However, there is bad news for the gaming division due to ‘higher memory and component costs’, noted AMD CEO Lisa Su
AMD’s CFO has predicted that ‘gaming revenue will decline by more than 20%’ in the second half of 2026 compared to the first half of the year

AMD just revealed its latest financial results, with good news for investors in the form of a big increase in revenue, but bad news for consumers, with more RAM-related concerns looming on the horizon.

Tom’s Hardware reports that AMD’s Q1 2026 financial results saw a new data center revenue record as the AI boom drove further growth, but CEO Lisa Su warned of PC component price increases going forward.

Su predicted that demand will slow with its client and gaming businesses – essentially the consumer side of AMD’s hardware – in the second half of 2026 due to “higher memory and component costs”.

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So yes, that means AMD’s CEO believes that after next month, as we head into Q3, RAM and other components will only get more expensive.

With gaming, the damage caused by price increases can be quite significant, as AMD CFO Jean Hu noted: “We expect the second half of [of 2026] gaming demand is affected by higher component and memory costs. We now expect gaming revenue in the second half of the year to fall by more than 20% compared to the first half.”

Analysis: Radeon price increases – or actually more expensive consoles?

(Image credit: AMD)

In other words, compared to the first half of the year (of which there are now less than two months left – time flies, as always), the second half of 2026 will be significantly more sluggish for AMD’s gaming revenue. The expectation is not just a 20% drop, but a more than 20% decrease, so it could be a quarter less money that has been handed in, or maybe more, up to 30%, even.

This suggests that AMD’s Radeon graphics cards will be in short supply in Q3 and Q4, and that there may be further price increases on RX 9000 models. It’s clear that AMD expects things to slow down with these graphics cards as 2026 rolls on, but of course its gaming revenue isn’t all about Radeon – Team Red also makes the semi-custom GPUs for the PlayStation and Xbox consoles.

Sales of these consoles are naturally softening, mind you, as they’re in the later stages of their life expectancy now, so we’re reaching saturation levels for potential buyers. What can also be considered here is the price increases for console hardware, causing further reluctance to buy – or possibly AMD expecting further PS5 or Xbox price increases later this year, compounding the misery.

It’s just a guess, but the outlook is clearly not good for the second half of 2026, and this is the latest in a quickfire round of pessimistic RAM crisis predictions, two of which have come from the memory chip makers themselves. Micron has warned of growing AI demand and more pressure on RAM supply, while Samsung has observed that ‘significant memory shortages’ will continue to plague us through 2027 as a best-case scenario.

There isn’t much faith out there in Reddit-land that RAM prices will recover anytime soon, or indeed that prices will ever reach the levels we saw last year before memory increases started coming thick and fast.

As one Redditor put it in response to this news from AMD: “My prediction is that over 2027 prices will drop from an insane 400% [price increase] to a nice and summery 200%. But they will never drop lower than that ever again. The RAM economy will permanently change and data centers will be a nuisance for the rest of recorded time.”