Asus has cracked the seal on price hikes just ahead of CES 2026. The electronics maker, which is responsible for a range of PC gaming hardware including the already $1,000 ROG Xbox Ally X, warned partners of “strategic price adjustments” for certain products starting January 5.
The company didn’t specify which products would get more expensive or by how much, but it did blame the current AI arms race for the upwards pressure on pricing. “These changes reflect shifts in capacity allocation by upstream suppliers, higher investment costs for advanced manufacturing processes, and structural supply gaps created by rising AI compute demand,” executive Liao Yi-Xiang wrote in a December 30 letter that was translated by Videocardz.
The company directly points to DRAM, NAND, and SSD component shortages as part of the issue. The announcement comes just days ahead of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where Asus and other hardware manufacturers will be revealing new hardware updates and other tech products.
Gaming shortages, price hikes, and next-gen console delays
Asus’ warning is the first hard evidence that 2026 will continue to see gaming get more expensive across the spectrum as major tech firms pivot to supplying ever-increasing demands for generative AI compute capacity. There were rumors throughout the end of 2025 that AMD and other companies were going to face shortages, with some hardware insiders claiming that Microsoft’s Xbox would be among the hardest hit due to poor inventory management.
According to Insider Gaming, the problem has gotten so bad that some hardware manufacturers are already discussing potential delays to next-gen hardware launches like the PlayStation 6 and new Xbox. “The situation has led console manufacturers to debate whether the next generation of consoles should be delayed from their intended 2027-2028 release window, with the hope that RAM manufacturers will be able to build out their infrastructure to produce more RAM, thereby allowing prices to drop,” it reported last month.
More recently, South Korea outlet Newsis reported that Nvidia and AMD are already looking at significantly increasing GPU prices in 2026. The most eye-popping claim was that graphics cards like the $2,000 RTX 5090 could more than double in price to $5,000 by the end of the year. But even much smaller price increases of just a few hundred dollars would make PC gaming’s current affordability crisis continue to spiral out of control.
Whatever the short-term impact on pricing for gaming components, the AI race has already remade companies like Microsoft and Nvidia, to the point where their non-AI business appears as a relative rounding error on the larger enterprise’s P&L. Without a complete implosion of the gen AI market (never say never), it’s hard to see that changing any time soon.