Memory and storage shortages and price hikes that started hitting PC components late last year have steadily rippled outward across all kinds of consumer tech—some products have disappeared, gone out of stock, or been delayed, and others have undergone multiple rounds of price hikes.
Today’s bad news comes from Sony, which is raising prices for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US just eight months after their last price hike. The drive-less Digital Edition will increase from $500 to $600; the base PS5 with an optical drive will increase from $550 to $650; and the PS5 Pro is going up from $750 to a whopping $900. At the beginning of 2025, these consoles cost $450, $500, and $700, respectively.
Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo had all announced one or more price increases for one or more consoles throughout 2025, though these were driven more by the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported goods than component shortages. Game console price cuts had already become less common over the course of the 2010s, making consoles like the five-plus-year-old PS5 historically expensive compared to older consoles at this point in their lifespans.
RAM and flash memory chips are in short supply primarily because of demand from AI data centers—memory manufacturers have shifted more production toward making the kind of memory found in AI accelerators like Nvidia’s H200, leaving less for the consumer market.
And the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, barring a major shift in demand from the AI industry. Manufacturers like Kioxia have said that their capacity is already sold out through the end of 2026. The complexity of chipmaking means it takes months or years to ramp up additional manufacturing capacity, and chipmakers can be slow to do it because they don’t want to end up with a glut of memory they can’t sell if market conditions change. In the short-to-medium term, this all means these high prices will probably stick around for a while.