- AMD has announced its Q1 results, with booming revenue driven by AI
- There’s bad news for the gaming division, though, due to ‘higher memory and component costs, ‘ AMD’s CEO Lisa Su observed
- AMD’s CFO has forecast ‘gaming revenue to decline by more than 20%’ in the second half of 2026 compared to the first half of the year
AMD just revealed its latest financial results, with good news for investors in the form of a major surge in revenue, but bad news for consumers, with more RAM-related worries looming on the horizon.
Tom’s Hardware reports that AMD’s Q1 2026 fiscal results witnessed a new record for data center revenue, as the AI boom drove further growth, but CEO Lisa Su warned of PC component price spikes going forward.
Su predicted that demand is going to wane with its client and gaming businesses – essentially the consumer side of AMD’s hardware – in the second half of 2026 due to “higher memory and component costs”.
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So, yes, that means AMD’s chief executive believes that after next month, as we head into Q3, RAM and other components are only going to get pricier.
With gaming, the damage done by price hikes could be quite considerable, as AMD’s Chief Financial Officer, Jean Hu, observed: “We expect second half [of 2026] demand in gaming to be impacted by higher component and memory cost. We now expect second half gaming revenue to decline by more than 20% compared to the first half.”
Analysis: Radeon price hikes – or indeed pricier consoles?
In other words, compared to the first half of the year (of which less than two months now remain – with time flying by, as ever), the second half of 2026 is going to be considerably more sluggish for AMD’s gaming revenue. The expectation isn’t just a 20% drop, but a more than 20% fall, so that could be a quarter less money raked in, or maybe more, up towards 30%, even.
This would seem to indicate that AMD’s Radeon graphics cards are going to be in shorter supply in Q3 and Q4, and that there may be further price hikes on RX 9000 models. Clearly, AMD is expecting things to slow down with these graphics cards as 2026 rolls on, but its gaming revenue isn’t just about Radeon, of course – Team Red also makes the semi-custom GPUs for the PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
Sales of those consoles are softening naturally, mind you, given that they’re in the later stages of their expected lifespan now, so we’re reaching saturation levels for would-be buyers. What could also be factored in here is the price hikes for console hardware, causing further unwillingness to buy – or possibly, AMD is anticipating further PS5 or Xbox price rises later this year, compounding the misery.
That’s just guesswork, but clearly the outlook isn’t great for the second half of 2026, and this is the latest in a quickfire round of pessimistic RAM crisis predictions, two of which have come from memory chipmakers themselves. Micron has warned of growing AI demand and more pressure on RAM supply, while Samsung has observed that ‘significant shortages’ of memory will continue to plague us through 2027 as a best-case scenario.
There isn’t much faith out there in Reddit-land that RAM pricing will recover anytime soon, or indeed that prices will ever reach the levels we saw last year, before the memory hikes started coming thick and fast.
As one Redditor put it in reaction to this news from AMD: “My prediction is that over 2027 prices will drop from an insane 400% [price increase] to a nice and summerly 200%. But they’ll never fall lower than that ever again. The RAM economy will permanently change and data centers will be a nuisance for the rest of recorded time.”
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