gaben gotta be this fucking close to just spinning up his own entire hardware fab company to bypass all this AI bullshit
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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Even with the kind of money he has, he can't just do that. It takes stupid amount of time to actually get a chip out of a fab after the build starts (let alone after just planning starts).
Yeah, there's a reason only a handful of companies on the planet even try it. On top of the time and technology requirements, there's also a massive patent minefield to navigate. Qualcomm is something like 20 times bigger than Valve with chips as their entire business model, and even they're still not big enough. Qualcomm contracts TMSC and Samsung to use their fabs.
Edit: added a bit...
Also it's not as if chips alone went insanely up beacuse the manufacturing equipment did so as well. And if you're building fabs, you're not gonna do it in the US or Europe - for a reason. Even Apple gave in to "Designed in California".
I want you to know I sat here thinking "who the heck is Evan Apple?" for way too long.
Yeah sorry, saussage fingers. Fixed now.
oh, I know he can't, the sheer complexity of tech hardware is not reasonable to set up in any reasonable time... But it seems like something Valve would try to do anyway.
They're only a like 300 hundred people in total, to run a fab they would have to expand to a point they are no longer valve
So now I'm priced out many times over.
I mean, what did we expect? Of course the outpriced price got outpriced.
Hopefully they'll finally release this thing before things get even worse. Still determined to get one, but I know I won't like the price.
I wonder if they could do a hardware revision at some point that has all the standalone capabilities stripped out. They've really focused on the streaming capabilities rather than the standalone aspect in their marketing anyway. So I think a version without any storage and just enough power to stream from a PC could be a way more feasible product in the current market.
I doubt that would make much of a difference. A streaming client still requires a processor, RAM, a wireless device, etc.
This was the only hardware from Valve that I was actually interested in. Whatever the price is, I'm sure it wasn't going to be good, but now it's going to be horrendous.
If theres one good thing here, its that Valve has been receiving shipments (and may very well have price lock contracts) already
I am pretty sure they openly said they don’t get contracts. They get told what they have to pay for whatever quantity they’re offered. If they don’t accept, they don’t hear from that seller ever again.
That was for ram. Cpu is likely different and semi custom
When will this AI bubble pop?
Actually, I'm not even sure the AI bubble popping will change hardware prices, unless the market is suddenly flooded with hardware that has to be sold when companies go bankrupt and datacenters have to be emptied.
The reason why prices have gone up isn't that other sectors are buying the consumer goods, it's that they are not even manufacturing consumer goods, because data centers don't use those. The stuff that we salvage from datacenters doesn't work on your desktop PC.
I won't defend anything, but at least it can be resoldered to boards that we can use in our normal computers. Question is how many people will put in the needed effort for that to happen.
When they finally have killed personal computing and forced everyone to rent Multics?
They'll never go back down but it would be nice if they'd at least stop going up
They've been going down for your entire life until recently. They're STILL going down, if you're buying what they're actually manufacturing.
Hurry up and release Steam Frames already ffs.
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