Handheld gaming PCs are in big trouble — and it’s not a surprise to see what’s responsible

Handheld gaming has been in a great place for a few years, ever since Valve launched the Steam Deck in 2022, kicking off a raft of portable gaming PCs appearing in all manner of incarnations.

Since the Steam Deck muscled onto the scene, Lenovo, Asus, and Ayaneo have all been busy launching new handhelds, offering a wide variety of options from lower to higher-end devices. Some have struck a nicely affordable chord, although many have been criticized for being overpriced.

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However, the situation with handhelds is swiftly changing, and not for the better. The AI boom has meant that prices for RAM and storage have skyrocketed, and the crisis is seemingly getting worse on a daily basis.

Notably, Ayaneo had its Next 2 handheld gaming PC poised to go sale, with pre-orders open and shipments scheduled for June 2026. Unfortunately, those pre-orders are no longer available, as the company has been forced to suspend sales for the new device due to rapidly rising component costs.

While Ayaneo is arguably a niche brand, one that pushes for higher specifications in a handheld that can provide gaming laptop-level performance, it’s not the only company that has seen its line-up of handheld devices impacted by the ongoing memory chip crisis. And it doesn’t look like it’ll be the last, either.

The AI boom might destroy handheld gaming PCs

At this rate, handheld gaming PCs are in grave danger of gradually being phased out, at least as a mainstream force. We’ve reached a point where device manufacturers are struggling to keep up with the cost and lack of availability of RAM and storage, and consumers simply can’t afford to pay entry-level desktop gaming PC prices for portable devices. All this is a direct result of the AI boom.

Ayaneo’s case is a telling example here, with the company admitting that hardly any profit has been made from the Next 2 handheld pre-orders taken thus far, as the overall cost of production has risen so much.

Another prime example of the chaos being sown with handhelds is Valve’s recent announcement that the Steam Deck OLED will be out of stock intermittently, and unsurprisingly, this is due to memory and storage supply issues.

The RAM crisis represents an increasingly difficult situation for Valve in particular, with the Steam Machine still in the pipeline for a launch in 2026 — and that has already faced a delay, once again, due to said crisis.

The affordability problems caused for both manufacturers and consumers are a recipe for disaster when it comes to handheld gaming PCs. The longer the AI boom continues, with data centers grabbing huge slabs of memory for AI tasks, the worse things will get for handheld production costs.

Ultimately, it all comes down to a nasty price to pay for consumers, who will be faced with ever more expensive price tags for handhelds that were already creeping into unaffordable territory even before the AI boom struck.

All this threatens to stall the progress that handheld gaming PCs have made since they grabbed their share of the limelight following the success of the Steam Deck. Previously this market was mostly dominated by niche brands like Ayaneo or Ayn, and those days could return — if the RAM crisis continues to make life miserable for handheld manufacturers, and consumer interest declines.

There are some tentative signs that the AI bubble could burst, notably with OpenAI putting the sword to Sora, and you never know what’s around the next corner — it’s not all doom and gloom.

However, I worry that even after the bubble eventually bursts — however long that may take — it could be some time before the supply of components normalizes. Predictions from analyst firms make that clear enough.

Hopefully, though, this component storm won’t be raging for too long, and handheld gaming PCs will manage to weather it. That does, of course, remain to be seen, and unfortunately matters are looking pretty rocky right now.

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Isaiah is a Staff Writer for the Computing channel at TechRadar. He’s spent over two years writing about all things tech, specifically games on PC, consoles, and handhelds. He started off at GameRant in 2022 after graduating from Birmingham City University in the same year, before writing at PC Guide which included work on deals articles, reviews, and news on PC products such as GPUs, CPUs, monitors, and more. He spends most of his time finding out about the exciting new features of upcoming GPUs, and is passionate about new game releases on PC, hoping that the ports aren’t a complete mess.