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Joined 29 days ago
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Cake day: January 15th, 2026

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  • There are two tracks of thought here.

    1. The US Tariffs are raising the cost too high. So US inventory is not being restocked.

    2. The DRAM constraints are raising the cost to manufacture too high. That affects both the RAM and SSD in the system. This would affect all manufacturing of the Steam Deck.

    As for it only being the US, they’re not going to be shifting international inventory after already situating it in more local distribution centers and dealing with customs. So the question comes down to, are the international stores/distribution centers still being restocked, or is everything on hold and the US just happens to be the first to sell out?




















  • Oh they want to… There are quite a few chip fabs around the world… there are very few that can manufacture at this size, along the bleeding edge of the numerous technologies necessary to do so.

    Having the knowledge required to build the fab, the actual hardware required to manufacture them, and the skilled personnel to operate it all are hard to do. This is not something that you can toss together in a cave from scraps like Iron Man.

    And a lot of that is by design with companies and governments trying to guarantee sovereignty by tightly controlling where these can be manufactured. The idea that enemies are less likely to try to take over/colonize a smaller country (like Taiwan) if the global chip manufacturing apparatus can be destroyed in minutes to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.