MW Hardcore gamers nurtured Nvidia and the AI boom. Now they feel betrayed by Big Tech.
By Christine Ji
'An ongoing culture war': AI is driving up the cost of key gaming components as Big Tech leaves the gaming industry, once an inseparable ally, in the dust
On most days after work, Jayden Weaver sheds his sales-manager role and logs in to his "Minecraft" account, where he and his YouTube audience of over 9,000 followers have built a sprawling modular kingdom. They've terraformed the desert terrain by planting trees, building houses, and even constructing a Walmart and an airport.
But not all is well outside of this idyllic "Minecraft" world on Weaver's gaming computer. The PC is equipped with a central processing unit, graphics card, random-access memory and high-capacity storage - the very same equipment that multitrillion-dollar tech companies are now hoovering up to power their artificial-intelligence ambitions.
The way 22-year-old Weaver sees it, the AI boom is threatening the hobby that has shaped his life since he was 8. Last fall, OpenAI inked deals with Samsung (KR:005930) and SK Hynix (KR:000660) to buy massive quantities of dynamic-random-access memory wafers for its Stargate data centers, contributing to a memory shortage. The average cost of the latest 32-gigabyte RAM kit, which Weaver considers the baseline standard for modern PC gaming, has increased to $560 from $150 in just one year, data from PCPartPicker shows. A 64-gigabyte RAM kit - a necessity for heavy game "modders," developers and diehard streamers - has surged to $1,000 from $250. Nvidia (NVDA) is slashing production of the company's consumer-facing GeForce graphics cards as it prioritizes delivering Blackwell and Rubin chips to its data-center customers, reports suggest.
Nvidia did not respond to MarketWatch requests for comment.
"They've taken the RAM that would have gone to consumers and flooded it into these data centers," said Weaver, who lives in Dawsonville, Ga. "That leaves people like me, who love building PCs, paying an arm and a leg for a crucial component." He hasn't been able to purchase any new components since the price hikes, he said. "It's held me back from buying and building PCs."
Alphabet $(GOOGL)$ $(GOOG)$, Amazon.com (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META) and Microsoft $(MSFT)$ are planning to spend upwards of $700 billion on AI this year, a tidal wave of cash that's gobbling up endless amounts of chips, memory, compute hardware, networking equipment and power required for their data-center plans.
Big Tech's obsession with AI infrastructure is starting to feel like a betrayal to the legions of gamers who nurtured some of the key companies and technologies driving the boom. Today, they're deeply frustrated with the results as the gaming industry stagnates and consumers face higher prices on everything from memory to storage drives and graphics cards.
For decades, gaming subsidized artificial intelligence, forging the careers of today's AI visionaries and providing the scaffolding for major AI breakthroughs. Advancements in machine learning, in turn, spurred more complex game-play features. Jagged geometric shapes evolved into photorealistic video-game characters thanks to increased memory and more efficient architectures. The most important chip company in AI, Nvidia, and its graphics processing units, arguably would not exist if not for the gaming industry, which also spawned pioneering AI lab Google DeepMind.
A punishing hangover from pandemic-era overinvestment had already left the gaming industry reeling. Budgets initially ballooned as gaming studios raced to capture the attention of people stuck in their homes. As demand waned in the following years, companies conducted mass layoffs, leading private-equity firms to swoop in to pick over the remains of distressed assets.
Now, as Big Tech corners the hardware market and drives up component prices, gamers worry that the AI gold rush is coming at their direct expense. Microsoft alone is expected to account for $190 billion of AI outlays this year, fueling an infrastructure blitz anchored by a multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI that CEO Satya Nadella kicked off in 2019. Weaver is concerned that the company's gaming portfolio - home to massive properties such as "Minecraft" and the Xbox hardware line - will suffer as a result. "They're hurting their own console sales when they raise Xbox prices for a family that wants to play Xbox," he said.
Microsoft did not respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
Weaver has aired his frustrations through YouTube videos, sparking a wave of agreement in the comments section. Steve Burke, editor-in-chief of the media channel Gamers Nexus, has garnered millions of views on YouTube videos bearing incendiary titles such as "Nvidia's AI Bubble" and "The Torture Will Continue Until Shareholder Value Improves."
The data-center boom is so lucrative that companies no longer need to cater to consumers as they did in the past, Burke told MarketWatch. It's posed an "existential risk" to gamers owning their own computing devices.
But worse than the price hikes is the unsettling feeling that consumers are being gaslit by tech giants paying lip service to the gaming community while delaying product releases or peddling AI-generated "slop."
"Really where the pain comes in for people is feeling like they're being lied to or manipulated," Burke said.
The gaming industry, once a partner, finds itself in the path of AI's advance.
Origin stories
NYU computer-science professor Julian Togelius studies the intersection of AI and gaming.
When Julian Togelius was 13, he used the proceeds from his gardening job to buy a used computer. The clunky machine had around the same amount of computing power as a modern-day toaster. Fascinated by computer games, Togelius taught himself to program so he could create his own.
"This is not a super uncommon kind of origin story," Togelius said of his childhood gaming experiences. "Many software people and developers and sometimes researchers of my age have similar experiences."
Today, the 47-year-old Togelius is a computer-science professor at New York University. As an artificial-intelligence researcher with a specialty in videogames, Togelius is caught in the middle of what he calls "an ongoing culture war" between his passions.
The gaming community has developed a "very, very fraught relationship with AI, and it's not getting better," according to Togelius. In fact, it's a "disaster."
Togelius is clinging to hope, grounded in his decades of industry experience, that the potential of AI will ultimately create more immersive virtual worlds.
"I've long had a vision of a big open-world game where you drive for hours in a random direction, and it creates new cities with new quests and architecture styles," Togelius said. Such a game would seamlessly mold itself to individual players' skills and tastes, constantly anticipating the narrative twists and visual landscapes that they would enjoy next.
From board games to first-person shooters, games have historically provided a structured, rules-based playground for digital algorithms to learn. Long before the modern GPU, computer-science legends like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon - the namesake of Anthropic's large language model - used chess to model human logic and cognition.
"You can have different scenarios, you can run them over and over again, [and] you can simulate them very fast," Togelius said of games. "When you fail, nothing bad happens."
After IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer scored a landmark victory over chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, researchers sought new simulations to push the frontiers of machine intelligence. Videogames, with their virtual worlds and continuous decision-making, were one promising avenue.
Against this backdrop rose one of the most influential figures of the modern AI field, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. DeepMind - established in 2010 by Hassabis and fellow technologists Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman - became the first modern artificial-general-intelligence lab, and its 2014 acquisition by Google famously galvanized the creation of OpenAI. Suleyman would go on to become Microsoft's CEO of AI.
Hassabis's life is a microcosm of the AI industry's broader evolution. At the age of 6 he was a chess prodigy. At 12 he was programming his own games. By 17 he had landed a full-time job at the game studio Bullfrog Games. It was there that Hassabis co-designed "Theme Park," a landmark game with bleeding-edge algorithmic capabilities that earned both critical acclaim and millions of sales. At 22, Hassabis graduated from the University of Cambridge and founded the gaming company Elixir Studios. Over a decade would pass before Hassabis could convince investors to back a pure AI research lab.
Around the same time as Hassabis was working on "Theme Park," Jensen Huang and two other men sat down in a Denny's diner and drafted a plan for a 3-D graphics company. Nvidia's founders, like Hassabis, were drawn to the economic prospects of videogames - an industry that offered a rare combination of high sales volumes and voracious appetite for computing power.
Early on, Nvidia struggled to find its footing. The company famously teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1996, surviving only through a $5 million cash injection from the Japanese videogame developer Sega. In the following years, Nvidia's fortunes turned around as the company pioneered the modern graphics processing unit. GPUs, with their parallel processing capabilities, could render vast swaths of pixels far better than central processing units, which can only carry out tasks sequentially.
A wave of consumer adoption powered Nvidia to an initial public offering in 1999. Nvidia scored a $200 million contract in 2000 from Microsoft to develop the hardware for Xbox consoles. Gamers, eagerly snapping up graphics cards, were the reason Nvidia endured.
The AI pivot
MW Hardcore gamers nurtured Nvidia and the AI boom. Now they feel betrayed by Big Tech.
By Christine Ji
'An ongoing culture war': AI is driving up the cost of key gaming components as Big Tech leaves the gaming industry, once an inseparable ally, in the dust
On most days after work, Jayden Weaver sheds his sales-manager role and logs in to his "Minecraft" account, where he and his YouTube audience of over 9,000 followers have built a sprawling modular kingdom. They've terraformed the desert terrain by planting trees, building houses, and even constructing a Walmart and an airport.
But not all is well outside of this idyllic "Minecraft" world on Weaver's gaming computer. The PC is equipped with a central processing unit, graphics card, random-access memory and high-capacity storage - the very same equipment that multitrillion-dollar tech companies are now hoovering up to power their artificial-intelligence ambitions.
The way 22-year-old Weaver sees it, the AI boom is threatening the hobby that has shaped his life since he was 8. Last fall, OpenAI inked deals with Samsung (KR:005930) and SK Hynix (KR:000660) to buy massive quantities of dynamic-random-access memory wafers for its Stargate data centers, contributing to a memory shortage. The average cost of the latest 32-gigabyte RAM kit, which Weaver considers the baseline standard for modern PC gaming, has increased to $560 from $150 in just one year, data from PCPartPicker shows. A 64-gigabyte RAM kit - a necessity for heavy game "modders," developers and diehard streamers - has surged to $1,000 from $250. Nvidia (NVDA) is slashing production of the company's consumer-facing GeForce graphics cards as it prioritizes delivering Blackwell and Rubin chips to its data-center customers, reports suggest.
Nvidia did not respond to MarketWatch requests for comment.
"They've taken the RAM that would have gone to consumers and flooded it into these data centers," said Weaver, who lives in Dawsonville, Ga. "That leaves people like me, who love building PCs, paying an arm and a leg for a crucial component." He hasn't been able to purchase any new components since the price hikes, he said. "It's held me back from buying and building PCs."
Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG), Amazon.com (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) are planning to spend upwards of $700 billion on AI this year, a tidal wave of cash that's gobbling up endless amounts of chips, memory, compute hardware, networking equipment and power required for their data-center plans.
Big Tech's obsession with AI infrastructure is starting to feel like a betrayal to the legions of gamers who nurtured some of the key companies and technologies driving the boom. Today, they're deeply frustrated with the results as the gaming industry stagnates and consumers face higher prices on everything from memory to storage drives and graphics cards.
For decades, gaming subsidized artificial intelligence, forging the careers of today's AI visionaries and providing the scaffolding for major AI breakthroughs. Advancements in machine learning, in turn, spurred more complex game-play features. Jagged geometric shapes evolved into photorealistic video-game characters thanks to increased memory and more efficient architectures. The most important chip company in AI, Nvidia, and its graphics processing units, arguably would not exist if not for the gaming industry, which also spawned pioneering AI lab Google DeepMind.
A punishing hangover from pandemic-era overinvestment had already left the gaming industry reeling. Budgets initially ballooned as gaming studios raced to capture the attention of people stuck in their homes. As demand waned in the following years, companies conducted mass layoffs, leading private-equity firms to swoop in to pick over the remains of distressed assets.
Now, as Big Tech corners the hardware market and drives up component prices, gamers worry that the AI gold rush is coming at their direct expense. Microsoft alone is expected to account for $190 billion of AI outlays this year, fueling an infrastructure blitz anchored by a multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI that CEO Satya Nadella kicked off in 2019. Weaver is concerned that the company's gaming portfolio - home to massive properties such as "Minecraft" and the Xbox hardware line - will suffer as a result. "They're hurting their own console sales when they raise Xbox prices for a family that wants to play Xbox," he said.
Microsoft did not respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
Weaver has aired his frustrations through YouTube videos, sparking a wave of agreement in the comments section. Steve Burke, editor-in-chief of the media channel Gamers Nexus, has garnered millions of views on YouTube videos bearing incendiary titles such as "Nvidia's AI Bubble" and "The Torture Will Continue Until Shareholder Value Improves."
The data-center boom is so lucrative that companies no longer need to cater to consumers as they did in the past, Burke told MarketWatch. It's posed an "existential risk" to gamers owning their own computing devices.
But worse than the price hikes is the unsettling feeling that consumers are being gaslit by tech giants paying lip service to the gaming community while delaying product releases or peddling AI-generated "slop."
"Really where the pain comes in for people is feeling like they're being lied to or manipulated," Burke said.
The gaming industry, once a partner, finds itself in the path of AI's advance.
Origin stories
NYU computer-science professor Julian Togelius studies the intersection of AI and gaming.
When Julian Togelius was 13, he used the proceeds from his gardening job to buy a used computer. The clunky machine had around the same amount of computing power as a modern-day toaster. Fascinated by computer games, Togelius taught himself to program so he could create his own.
"This is not a super uncommon kind of origin story," Togelius said of his childhood gaming experiences. "Many software people and developers and sometimes researchers of my age have similar experiences."
Today, the 47-year-old Togelius is a computer-science professor at New York University. As an artificial-intelligence researcher with a specialty in videogames, Togelius is caught in the middle of what he calls "an ongoing culture war" between his passions.
The gaming community has developed a "very, very fraught relationship with AI, and it's not getting better," according to Togelius. In fact, it's a "disaster."
Togelius is clinging to hope, grounded in his decades of industry experience, that the potential of AI will ultimately create more immersive virtual worlds.
"I've long had a vision of a big open-world game where you drive for hours in a random direction, and it creates new cities with new quests and architecture styles," Togelius said. Such a game would seamlessly mold itself to individual players' skills and tastes, constantly anticipating the narrative twists and visual landscapes that they would enjoy next.
From board games to first-person shooters, games have historically provided a structured, rules-based playground for digital algorithms to learn. Long before the modern GPU, computer-science legends like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon - the namesake of Anthropic's large language model - used chess to model human logic and cognition.
"You can have different scenarios, you can run them over and over again, [and] you can simulate them very fast," Togelius said of games. "When you fail, nothing bad happens."
After IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer scored a landmark victory over chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, researchers sought new simulations to push the frontiers of machine intelligence. Videogames, with their virtual worlds and continuous decision-making, were one promising avenue.
Against this backdrop rose one of the most influential figures of the modern AI field, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. DeepMind - established in 2010 by Hassabis and fellow technologists Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman - became the first modern artificial-general-intelligence lab, and its 2014 acquisition by Google famously galvanized the creation of OpenAI. Suleyman would go on to become Microsoft's CEO of AI.
Hassabis's life is a microcosm of the AI industry's broader evolution. At the age of 6 he was a chess prodigy. At 12 he was programming his own games. By 17 he had landed a full-time job at the game studio Bullfrog Games. It was there that Hassabis co-designed "Theme Park," a landmark game with bleeding-edge algorithmic capabilities that earned both critical acclaim and millions of sales. At 22, Hassabis graduated from the University of Cambridge and founded the gaming company Elixir Studios. Over a decade would pass before Hassabis could convince investors to back a pure AI research lab.
Around the same time as Hassabis was working on "Theme Park," Jensen Huang and two other men sat down in a Denny's diner and drafted a plan for a 3-D graphics company. Nvidia's founders, like Hassabis, were drawn to the economic prospects of videogames - an industry that offered a rare combination of high sales volumes and voracious appetite for computing power.
Early on, Nvidia struggled to find its footing. The company famously teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1996, surviving only through a $5 million cash injection from the Japanese videogame developer Sega. In the following years, Nvidia's fortunes turned around as the company pioneered the modern graphics processing unit. GPUs, with their parallel processing capabilities, could render vast swaths of pixels far better than central processing units, which can only carry out tasks sequentially.
A wave of consumer adoption powered Nvidia to an initial public offering in 1999. Nvidia scored a $200 million contract in 2000 from Microsoft to develop the hardware for Xbox consoles. Gamers, eagerly snapping up graphics cards, were the reason Nvidia endured.
The AI pivot
MW Hardcore gamers nurtured Nvidia and the AI -2-
Nvidia's chips have come a long way from their humble origins. Today they perform hundreds of septillions of matrix multiplications to power leading large language models. This evolution was thanks to a daring business move from Huang, who funneled the profits Nvidia generated from its gaming business to develop a software layer called Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA.
"You can think about it as the programming environment for GPUs," Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said of CUDA, which was introduced in 2006. Using CUDA, developers can customize GPUs for general-purpose tasks. It's the primary reason Nvidia was able to grow into the AI giant it is today, while dozens of competitors died off or were acquired in the early aughts, according to Rasgon. But for many years CUDA was a black hole bogging down Nvidia's gaming business as it burned through cash.
Nvidia's AI bet achieved proof of concept among the scientific community in 2012. A deep-learning model called AlexNet, trained on Nvidia GPUs, wowed the AI community with its record-breaking accuracy in identifying images. Armed with specialized gaming hardware, AI researchers continued to use games as a laboratory for developing advanced algorithms. Throughout the 2010s, DeepMind achieved a series of AI breakthroughs this way, and the lab continues to explore game-driven AI research today.
In 2015, researchers developed an AI agent capable of independently learning and mastering Atari classics such as "Pong" and "Breakout." Next, they tackled the ancient Chinese board game Go. After DeepMind's AlphaGo computer program defeated world champion Lee Sedol in 2016, the lab set its sights on the game "StarCraft II" - widely deemed one of the hardest esports ever. To teach a computer how to command troops and resources to compete for galactic dominance, DeepMind tested its AI model against the expertise of professional "StarCraft" players such as Dario Wünsch. The AlphaStar agent eventually emerged victorious over the human.
Unlike turn-based games that progress with sequential, alternating moves, "StarCraft" has a high degree of complexity that makes it well-suited to training machine intelligence. "It's a real-time strategy game which mimics real-world problems more closely," Wünsch, now retired from competitive "StarCraft," told MarketWatch. Wünsch's contributions earned him a co-author position on DeepMind's 2019 AlphaStar paper.
While Wünsch is optimistic about AI's potential to drive scientific breakthroughs, he acknowledged that the AI boom has strained the gaming industry.
"What I always liked about PC gaming is that I'm very much in control of my own device. If a singular part of my PC breaks, I can replace that," Wünsch said. "My family didn't have a ton of money, but that made it very accessible for us to still keep up with the technology. The higher prices are becoming, the fewer people will be able to afford having a gaming PC."
Shareholder gains, gamer pains
Togelius's and Hassabis's origin stories are relics of a bygone era where gaming was the money-making machine and AI was a quixotic science experiment.
Nvidia's data-center revenue surpassed gaming in 2022. For the year ending Jan. 25, 2026, data-center revenue topped $193 billion, making up 90% of the company's overall sales. Nvidia's stock has rallied over 1,300% over the past five years, far outpacing the S&P 500's 93% gain.
To Wall Street, and perhaps the company itself, Nvidia's gaming business is increasingly a rounding error as it rebrands itself as an end-to-end AI ecosystem. On its latest earnings call, Nvidia formalized this shift by consolidating its financial reporting into just two segments: Data Center and a catch-all Edge Computing category that houses its gaming, automotive, robotics and other miscellaneous revenue streams.
"We care a lot less, let's put it that way. The numbers have gotten so big you kind of lose all sense of proportion," Bernstein's Rasgon said.
As a result, gaming hardware is skyrocketing in price, and gamers feel like an afterthought. According to Ryan Marinelli, principal technical specialist for the hardware price-tracking platform PCPartPicker, an entry-level gaming setup cost between $800 and $1,200 a year ago. Today, PC builds are trending toward the $1,500-to-$2,000 range. "It's not just RAM," Marinelli added. "We've seen storage drives and graphics cards go up in price."
Nvidia is reportedly shelving its gaming GPU release plans for 2026 due to the ongoing memory-chip shortage, breaking a 30-year tradition of yearly releases. Existing Nvidia chips, such as the flagship GeForce RTX 5090, are in short supply and can go for more than double the manufacturer's suggested retail price of $1,999.
Last December, memory and storage-solutions company Micron $(MU)$ announced it was pulling out of the consumer market to improve supply for enterprise customers. Price increases have spread to gaming consoles, as well. Microsoft raised Xbox prices twice in 2025. In March, Sony $(SONY)$ announced price hikes on its PlayStation 5 lineup by as much as 20%, citing "pressures in the global economic landscape."
For as long as Austin Gallagher can remember, an Xbox was a fixture in his home. Growing up, Gallagher and his older brother played games like "Halo," battling alien armies to save humanity from extinction. Eventually, Gallagher began building his own PCs, and today he works as a games reviewer.
Austin Gallagher, a games reviewer, grew up playing games like "Halo" on the family Xbox.
Gallagher feels like he's watching the death of the gaming industry unfold in front of his eyes, he said, as higher hardware costs prevent younger generations from entering the hobby: "If you're a 10-year-old kid and you can't justify to your parents that they should buy you a [PlayStation 5], how do you get into gaming long-term?"
Gallagher sees younger generations spending more time on games such as "Fortnite" or on the Roblox platform; both are free-to-play but come with in-game transactions. Or, they might forgo games entirely and spend time watching short-form content, Gallagher said. A TikTok that Gallagher made on the topic garnered nearly 2,000 likes and over 500 comments.
Recent layoffs at Epic Games, the maker of "Fortnite," corroborate Gallagher's concerns. The company shed more than 1,000 employees in March. CEO Tim Sweeney attributed the decision to a downturn in engagement coupled with industrywide challenges, such as rising component costs and lower console sales.
Today's layoffs are a continuation of the slow bleed that has plagued the gaming industry postpandemic. According to a January report from the GDC Festival of Gaming, a third of U.S. game-industry workers surveyed reported experiencing layoffs in the past two years. Students are concerned about the lack of entry-level jobs and competition with laid-off workers. "It is probably the worst time in the last 40 years to try to make a future in game dev," reads one comment on a Reddit post in r/gamedev titled "Should I reconsider a career in this industry?"
Gallagher sees this unfolding firsthand: Several of his friends in the industry have been laid off. Budget cuts have limited the amount of full-time roles available, and Gallagher's partner works at a games studio on a part-time contract.
"I remember in 2024, the mantra 'Survive until 2025' was being shared in game-developer chats," Gallagher said. "Now, 2026 is similar. We're seeing an absolutely gigantic brain drain of the industry."
'Slopvidia'
The boundary at which gaming ends and AI begins has always been blurry. For decades, nonplayable characters have employed a basic form of AI to drive scripted dialogue and behaviors. And in 2018, Nvidia introduced Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which uses AI to enhance images and introduce new frames in real time.
But in March, Kevin Vargas did a double take when he saw Nvidia's announcement of the latest version of the technology. Scheduled to roll out in the fall, DLSS 5 adds photorealistic lighting and refinements to characters and landscapes. For Vargas, DLSS 5 had crossed a line by populating the game design with soulless AI imagery that degraded the artistry and quality.
The announcement seemed to be yet another sign that the earliest supporters of Nvidia would not be sharing in the company's spoils. On top of increasingly inaccessible hardware, Nvidia was now pushing AI-altered visuals, which many gamers suspected would only accelerate the industry's crumbling job market by replacing human artists.
"I come from an animation background, so it's a little personal for me," David Howe, an animation editor and host of the gaming podcast "Super Switch Headz," told MarketWatch. Artists and others in Howe's industry will be the "first on the chopping block" as DLSS and generative AI become more integrated into the game-development pipeline, he said.
In his free time, animation editor David Howe runs a gaming podcast called "Super Switch Headz."
"It's like putting a Snapchat filter on something," Vargas told MarketWatch. "It changes the original art." Vargas became a full-time gaming-content creator after being laid off from a role at Warby Parker last year. He posted his reaction to Nvidia's announcement in a TikTok video titled "Nvidia DLSS 5 is AI SLOP!"
Upset gamers quickly flooded the YouTube comments of Nvidia's DLSS 5 reveal, which portrayed Grace Ashcroft, the protagonist of action-horror blockbuster "Resident Evil Requiem," getting "yassified," according to Vargas and others. Many pointed out how DLSS 5 went beyond mere lighting enhancements to give Grace sharper cheekbones, fuller lips and an uncanny AI look.
"That's why we don't have RAM anymore?" one user commented. "I cannot wait for the AI bubble to burst," another wrote.
MW Hardcore gamers nurtured Nvidia and the AI boom. Now they feel betrayed by Big Tech.
By Christine Ji
'An ongoing culture war': AI is driving up the cost of key gaming components as Big Tech leaves the gaming industry, once an inseparable ally, in the dust
On most days after work, Jayden Weaver sheds his sales-manager role and logs in to his "Minecraft" account, where he and his YouTube audience of over 9,000 followers have built a sprawling modular kingdom. They've terraformed the desert terrain by planting trees, building houses, and even constructing a Walmart and an airport.
But not all is well outside of this idyllic "Minecraft" world on Weaver's gaming computer. The PC is equipped with a central processing unit, graphics card, random-access memory and high-capacity storage - the very same equipment that multitrillion-dollar tech companies are now hoovering up to power their artificial-intelligence ambitions.
The way 22-year-old Weaver sees it, the AI boom is threatening the hobby that has shaped his life since he was 8. Last fall, OpenAI inked deals with Samsung (KR:005930) and SK Hynix (KR:000660) to buy massive quantities of dynamic-random-access memory wafers for its Stargate data centers, contributing to a memory shortage. The average cost of the latest 32-gigabyte RAM kit, which Weaver considers the baseline standard for modern PC gaming, has increased to $560 from $150 in just one year, data from PCPartPicker shows. A 64-gigabyte RAM kit - a necessity for heavy game "modders," developers and diehard streamers - has surged to $1,000 from $250. Nvidia (NVDA) is slashing production of the company's consumer-facing GeForce graphics cards as it prioritizes delivering Blackwell and Rubin chips to its data-center customers, reports suggest.
Nvidia did not respond to MarketWatch requests for comment.
"They've taken the RAM that would have gone to consumers and flooded it into these data centers," said Weaver, who lives in Dawsonville, Ga. "That leaves people like me, who love building PCs, paying an arm and a leg for a crucial component." He hasn't been able to purchase any new components since the price hikes, he said. "It's held me back from buying and building PCs."
Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG), Amazon.com (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) are planning to spend upwards of $700 billion on AI this year, a tidal wave of cash that's gobbling up endless amounts of chips, memory, compute hardware, networking equipment and power required for their data-center plans.
Big Tech's obsession with AI infrastructure is starting to feel like a betrayal to the legions of gamers who nurtured some of the key companies and technologies driving the boom. Today, they're deeply frustrated with the results as the gaming industry stagnates and consumers face higher prices on everything from memory to storage drives and graphics cards.
For decades, gaming subsidized artificial intelligence, forging the careers of today's AI visionaries and providing the scaffolding for major AI breakthroughs. Advancements in machine learning, in turn, spurred more complex game-play features. Jagged geometric shapes evolved into photorealistic video-game characters thanks to increased memory and more efficient architectures. The most important chip company in AI, Nvidia, and its graphics processing units, arguably would not exist if not for the gaming industry, which also spawned pioneering AI lab Google DeepMind.
A punishing hangover from pandemic-era overinvestment had already left the gaming industry reeling. Budgets initially ballooned as gaming studios raced to capture the attention of people stuck in their homes. As demand waned in the following years, companies conducted mass layoffs, leading private-equity firms to swoop in to pick over the remains of distressed assets.
Now, as Big Tech corners the hardware market and drives up component prices, gamers worry that the AI gold rush is coming at their direct expense. Microsoft alone is expected to account for $190 billion of AI outlays this year, fueling an infrastructure blitz anchored by a multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI that CEO Satya Nadella kicked off in 2019. Weaver is concerned that the company's gaming portfolio - home to massive properties such as "Minecraft" and the Xbox hardware line - will suffer as a result. "They're hurting their own console sales when they raise Xbox prices for a family that wants to play Xbox," he said.
Microsoft did not respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.
Weaver has aired his frustrations through YouTube videos, sparking a wave of agreement in the comments section. Steve Burke, editor-in-chief of the media channel Gamers Nexus, has garnered millions of views on YouTube videos bearing incendiary titles such as "Nvidia's AI Bubble" and "The Torture Will Continue Until Shareholder Value Improves."
The data-center boom is so lucrative that companies no longer need to cater to consumers as they did in the past, Burke told MarketWatch. It's posed an "existential risk" to gamers owning their own computing devices.
But worse than the price hikes is the unsettling feeling that consumers are being gaslit by tech giants paying lip service to the gaming community while delaying product releases or peddling AI-generated "slop."
"Really where the pain comes in for people is feeling like they're being lied to or manipulated," Burke said.
The gaming industry, once a partner, finds itself in the path of AI's advance.
Origin stories
NYU computer-science professor Julian Togelius studies the intersection of AI and gaming.
When Julian Togelius was 13, he used the proceeds from his gardening job to buy a used computer. The clunky machine had around the same amount of computing power as a modern-day toaster. Fascinated by computer games, Togelius taught himself to program so he could create his own.
"This is not a super uncommon kind of origin story," Togelius said of his childhood gaming experiences. "Many software people and developers and sometimes researchers of my age have similar experiences."
Today, the 47-year-old Togelius is a computer-science professor at New York University. As an artificial-intelligence researcher with a specialty in videogames, Togelius is caught in the middle of what he calls "an ongoing culture war" between his passions.
The gaming community has developed a "very, very fraught relationship with AI, and it's not getting better," according to Togelius. In fact, it's a "disaster."
Togelius is clinging to hope, grounded in his decades of industry experience, that the potential of AI will ultimately create more immersive virtual worlds.
"I've long had a vision of a big open-world game where you drive for hours in a random direction, and it creates new cities with new quests and architecture styles," Togelius said. Such a game would seamlessly mold itself to individual players' skills and tastes, constantly anticipating the narrative twists and visual landscapes that they would enjoy next.
From board games to first-person shooters, games have historically provided a structured, rules-based playground for digital algorithms to learn. Long before the modern GPU, computer-science legends like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon - the namesake of Anthropic's large language model - used chess to model human logic and cognition.
"You can have different scenarios, you can run them over and over again, [and] you can simulate them very fast," Togelius said of games. "When you fail, nothing bad happens."
After IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer scored a landmark victory over chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, researchers sought new simulations to push the frontiers of machine intelligence. Videogames, with their virtual worlds and continuous decision-making, were one promising avenue.
Against this backdrop rose one of the most influential figures of the modern AI field, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. DeepMind - established in 2010 by Hassabis and fellow technologists Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman - became the first modern artificial-general-intelligence lab, and its 2014 acquisition by Google famously galvanized the creation of OpenAI. Suleyman would go on to become Microsoft's CEO of AI.
Hassabis's life is a microcosm of the AI industry's broader evolution. At the age of 6 he was a chess prodigy. At 12 he was programming his own games. By 17 he had landed a full-time job at the game studio Bullfrog Games. It was there that Hassabis co-designed "Theme Park," a landmark game with bleeding-edge algorithmic capabilities that earned both critical acclaim and millions of sales. At 22, Hassabis graduated from the University of Cambridge and founded the gaming company Elixir Studios. Over a decade would pass before Hassabis could convince investors to back a pure AI research lab.
Around the same time as Hassabis was working on "Theme Park," Jensen Huang and two other men sat down in a Denny's diner and drafted a plan for a 3-D graphics company. Nvidia's founders, like Hassabis, were drawn to the economic prospects of videogames - an industry that offered a rare combination of high sales volumes and voracious appetite for computing power.
Early on, Nvidia struggled to find its footing. The company famously teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1996, surviving only through a $5 million cash injection from the Japanese videogame developer Sega. In the following years, Nvidia's fortunes turned around as the company pioneered the modern graphics processing unit. GPUs, with their parallel processing capabilities, could render vast swaths of pixels far better than central processing units, which can only carry out tasks sequentially.
A wave of consumer adoption powered Nvidia to an initial public offering in 1999. Nvidia scored a $200 million contract in 2000 from Microsoft to develop the hardware for Xbox consoles. Gamers, eagerly snapping up graphics cards, were the reason Nvidia endured.
The AI pivot
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Nvidia's chips have come a long way from their humble origins. Today they perform hundreds of septillions of matrix multiplications to power leading large language models. This evolution was thanks to a daring business move from Huang, who funneled the profits Nvidia generated from its gaming business to develop a software layer called Compute Unified Device Architecture, or CUDA.
"You can think about it as the programming environment for GPUs," Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said of CUDA, which was introduced in 2006. Using CUDA, developers can customize GPUs for general-purpose tasks. It's the primary reason Nvidia was able to grow into the AI giant it is today, while dozens of competitors died off or were acquired in the early aughts, according to Rasgon. But for many years CUDA was a black hole bogging down Nvidia's gaming business as it burned through cash.
Nvidia's AI bet achieved proof of concept among the scientific community in 2012. A deep-learning model called AlexNet, trained on Nvidia GPUs, wowed the AI community with its record-breaking accuracy in identifying images. Armed with specialized gaming hardware, AI researchers continued to use games as a laboratory for developing advanced algorithms. Throughout the 2010s, DeepMind achieved a series of AI breakthroughs this way, and the lab continues to explore game-driven AI research today.
In 2015, researchers developed an AI agent capable of independently learning and mastering Atari classics such as "Pong" and "Breakout." Next, they tackled the ancient Chinese board game Go. After DeepMind's AlphaGo computer program defeated world champion Lee Sedol in 2016, the lab set its sights on the game "StarCraft II" - widely deemed one of the hardest esports ever. To teach a computer how to command troops and resources to compete for galactic dominance, DeepMind tested its AI model against the expertise of professional "StarCraft" players such as Dario Wünsch. The AlphaStar agent eventually emerged victorious over the human.
Unlike turn-based games that progress with sequential, alternating moves, "StarCraft" has a high degree of complexity that makes it well-suited to training machine intelligence. "It's a real-time strategy game which mimics real-world problems more closely," Wünsch, now retired from competitive "StarCraft," told MarketWatch. Wünsch's contributions earned him a co-author position on DeepMind's 2019 AlphaStar paper.
While Wünsch is optimistic about AI's potential to drive scientific breakthroughs, he acknowledged that the AI boom has strained the gaming industry.
"What I always liked about PC gaming is that I'm very much in control of my own device. If a singular part of my PC breaks, I can replace that," Wünsch said. "My family didn't have a ton of money, but that made it very accessible for us to still keep up with the technology. The higher prices are becoming, the fewer people will be able to afford having a gaming PC."
Shareholder gains, gamer pains
Togelius's and Hassabis's origin stories are relics of a bygone era where gaming was the money-making machine and AI was a quixotic science experiment.
Nvidia's data-center revenue surpassed gaming in 2022. For the year ending Jan. 25, 2026, data-center revenue topped $193 billion, making up 90% of the company's overall sales. Nvidia's stock has rallied over 1,300% over the past five years, far outpacing the S&P 500's 93% gain.
To Wall Street, and perhaps the company itself, Nvidia's gaming business is increasingly a rounding error as it rebrands itself as an end-to-end AI ecosystem. On its latest earnings call, Nvidia formalized this shift by consolidating its financial reporting into just two segments: Data Center and a catch-all Edge Computing category that houses its gaming, automotive, robotics and other miscellaneous revenue streams.
"We care a lot less, let's put it that way. The numbers have gotten so big you kind of lose all sense of proportion," Bernstein's Rasgon said.
As a result, gaming hardware is skyrocketing in price, and gamers feel like an afterthought. According to Ryan Marinelli, principal technical specialist for the hardware price-tracking platform PCPartPicker, an entry-level gaming setup cost between $800 and $1,200 a year ago. Today, PC builds are trending toward the $1,500-to-$2,000 range. "It's not just RAM," Marinelli added. "We've seen storage drives and graphics cards go up in price."
Nvidia is reportedly shelving its gaming GPU release plans for 2026 due to the ongoing memory-chip shortage, breaking a 30-year tradition of yearly releases. Existing Nvidia chips, such as the flagship GeForce RTX 5090, are in short supply and can go for more than double the manufacturer's suggested retail price of $1,999.
Last December, memory and storage-solutions company Micron (MU) announced it was pulling out of the consumer market to improve supply for enterprise customers. Price increases have spread to gaming consoles, as well. Microsoft raised Xbox prices twice in 2025. In March, Sony (SONY) announced price hikes on its PlayStation 5 lineup by as much as 20%, citing "pressures in the global economic landscape."
For as long as Austin Gallagher can remember, an Xbox was a fixture in his home. Growing up, Gallagher and his older brother played games like "Halo," battling alien armies to save humanity from extinction. Eventually, Gallagher began building his own PCs, and today he works as a games reviewer.
Austin Gallagher, a games reviewer, grew up playing games like "Halo" on the family Xbox.
Gallagher feels like he's watching the death of the gaming industry unfold in front of his eyes, he said, as higher hardware costs prevent younger generations from entering the hobby: "If you're a 10-year-old kid and you can't justify to your parents that they should buy you a [PlayStation 5], how do you get into gaming long-term?"
Gallagher sees younger generations spending more time on games such as "Fortnite" or on the Roblox platform; both are free-to-play but come with in-game transactions. Or, they might forgo games entirely and spend time watching short-form content, Gallagher said. A TikTok that Gallagher made on the topic garnered nearly 2,000 likes and over 500 comments.
Recent layoffs at Epic Games, the maker of "Fortnite," corroborate Gallagher's concerns. The company shed more than 1,000 employees in March. CEO Tim Sweeney attributed the decision to a downturn in engagement coupled with industrywide challenges, such as rising component costs and lower console sales.
Today's layoffs are a continuation of the slow bleed that has plagued the gaming industry postpandemic. According to a January report from the GDC Festival of Gaming, a third of U.S. game-industry workers surveyed reported experiencing layoffs in the past two years. Students are concerned about the lack of entry-level jobs and competition with laid-off workers. "It is probably the worst time in the last 40 years to try to make a future in game dev," reads one comment on a Reddit post in r/gamedev titled "Should I reconsider a career in this industry?"
Gallagher sees this unfolding firsthand: Several of his friends in the industry have been laid off. Budget cuts have limited the amount of full-time roles available, and Gallagher's partner works at a games studio on a part-time contract.
"I remember in 2024, the mantra 'Survive until 2025' was being shared in game-developer chats," Gallagher said. "Now, 2026 is similar. We're seeing an absolutely gigantic brain drain of the industry."
'Slopvidia'
The boundary at which gaming ends and AI begins has always been blurry. For decades, nonplayable characters have employed a basic form of AI to drive scripted dialogue and behaviors. And in 2018, Nvidia introduced Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which uses AI to enhance images and introduce new frames in real time.
But in March, Kevin Vargas did a double take when he saw Nvidia's announcement of the latest version of the technology. Scheduled to roll out in the fall, DLSS 5 adds photorealistic lighting and refinements to characters and landscapes. For Vargas, DLSS 5 had crossed a line by populating the game design with soulless AI imagery that degraded the artistry and quality.
The announcement seemed to be yet another sign that the earliest supporters of Nvidia would not be sharing in the company's spoils. On top of increasingly inaccessible hardware, Nvidia was now pushing AI-altered visuals, which many gamers suspected would only accelerate the industry's crumbling job market by replacing human artists.
"I come from an animation background, so it's a little personal for me," David Howe, an animation editor and host of the gaming podcast "Super Switch Headz," told MarketWatch. Artists and others in Howe's industry will be the "first on the chopping block" as DLSS and generative AI become more integrated into the game-development pipeline, he said.
In his free time, animation editor David Howe runs a gaming podcast called "Super Switch Headz."
"It's like putting a Snapchat filter on something," Vargas told MarketWatch. "It changes the original art." Vargas became a full-time gaming-content creator after being laid off from a role at Warby Parker last year. He posted his reaction to Nvidia's announcement in a TikTok video titled "Nvidia DLSS 5 is AI SLOP!"
Upset gamers quickly flooded the YouTube comments of Nvidia's DLSS 5 reveal, which portrayed Grace Ashcroft, the protagonist of action-horror blockbuster "Resident Evil Requiem," getting "yassified," according to Vargas and others. Many pointed out how DLSS 5 went beyond mere lighting enhancements to give Grace sharper cheekbones, fuller lips and an uncanny AI look.
"That's why we don't have RAM anymore?" one user commented. "I cannot wait for the AI bubble to burst," another wrote.
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Nvidia stepped in and addressed the backlash. "I don't love AI slop myself," Huang said on a March podcast. He distinguished DLSS 5 from "slop," emphasizing that the technology retains the artist's vision by enhancing frames, not changing them. The defense fell flat as angry gamers began referring to the company as "Slopvidia" across various social-media platforms.
Additionally, any game or studio that utilizes AI "basically gets soft-canceled," Howe said. Indie game "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" was disqualified from an award show after people discovered that the game had utilized AI-generated graphical textures.
"If I hear that 'Grand Theft Auto VI' - which is coming out later this year - was made half by AI, I genuinely don't think I would buy it anymore," Vargas told MarketWatch. For a game with an estimated budget of over $1 billion, he said, he would expect production "to support real humans."
Watching AI developments unfold over the years has left Howe feeling conflicted. He recalls his first time using a computer, navigating a pixelated "Donkey Kong" figure across the neon screen of a Texas Instruments machine. The gaming industry has come a long way since then.
"Anytime you see advancements in tech and in AI, it's almost always put towards games," Howe said. "I've lived most of my life as a futurist, and I don't hate technology. I'm certainly no Luddite - but I've had a lot of the hope sucked out of me in the post-COVID years."
-Christine Ji
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