According to reliable hardware leaker Moore’s Law Is Dead, some quick thinking from Sony should prevent the PS5 from being impacted by impending RAM shortages.
The YouTuber claims the Japanese company gobbled up a large supply of GDDR6 RAM while prices were low, shielding it from potential scarcity.
Microsoft, apparently, was not as smart, and has allegedly started to warn partners that further Xbox Series X|S price hikes are coming. The machine is already by far the most expensive on the market, and the Redmond firm has not announced any discounts for Black Friday yet.
To cut a long story short, OpenAI has signed lucrative long-term memory deals with the likes of Samsung and SK Hynix which will see it purchase up to an estimated 40% of the world’s total supply of DRAM.
That means all other computing manufacturers – from consoles to cars to smartphones – are fighting over the remaining 60%, and panic buying has jacked up the prices significantly.
But Sony saw this situation coming, and allegedly stocked up on the components it needed while the prices were still low. This means it’ll be safe from any potential price hikes for the foreseeable future, and it even has the flexibility to reduce the PS5’s price on Black Friday.
Now that’s not to say the console will be protected forever: if rates don’t eventually come down then PlayStation could still be affected by the higher prices in the future. But for now, it sounds like it’s safe.
It isn’t the first time this generation Sony has thought ahead and adjusted its business to account for potential hypotheticals: it also stockpiled a ton of PS5 inventory in the US once tariffs started to be touted, shielding it from price increases longer than its competitors.
Unfortunately, the company did eventually have to adjust the pricing of the platform. It’s since made tweaks to the memory capacity of the console in Europe to prevent it from having to raise prices further, as manufacturing prices also soar.
