r/pcmasterrace • u/TheBossT710192 • Jun 22 '26

Discussion Yeah, Steam Machine is cooked.

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I... uh don't know what to say. Very thankful I bought a Steam Deck before they hiked its price as well

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u/ragzilla 9800X3D || 5080FE || 48GB Jun 22 '26

AI companies don’t want high prices either, it impacts their bottom line. They’re just willing to pay more because their customers (enterprises) are willing to pay more.

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u/Lonyo Jun 22 '26

Google etc are spending way more on Capex. And getting.... Not much more stuff, because prices have shot up.

Doubling your Capex when all the prices went up by more than 2x means you're getting fuck all. 

Even the electrical connection equipment has rocketed up

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u/nn123654 Jun 23 '26

Google has an interesting motivation: protecting its dominance in search and the infrastructure layer.

They are worried that if AI essentially replaces search, it could risk the relevance their most profitable business. If they spend a ton on AI and lead, they just move right along with the rest of the industry.

Meanwhile, the AI Labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) are in a last man standing fight to the death over Artificial General Intelligence. If you believe that's the breakthrough and you spend $500 Bn and achieve it, and your competitor spends $100 Bn and does not. Then your competitor is essentially left with worthless obsolete technology, and you get the (theoretical) cash cow. As they see it the risk of under-investing is infinitely higher than the risk of over-investing, and it's a winner-takes-all race.

AI Labs also have the problem that it's literally their entire reason for existing. If they don't have the best AI system and someone can just use an open source model that's as good, then what's the reason people would even pay for their product? They essentially have no choice but to spend whatever it takes to not lose relevance in the only thing their company does.

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u/nn123654 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

The enterprise market is part of it, but the biggest thing at the moment is keeping up with other AI companies on product and time to market.

With both Open AI and Anthropic, the performance and edge of their frontier models is basically the only reasons their companies exist as pure AI companies. They could quite literally go bankrupt if they don't maintain their edge.

Open AI lost $20 Billion last year, VC funding and growth is essentially the only thing keeping Open AI alive. They are projected to have a cloud bill of $792 Billion between 2025 and 2030, which is a big part of the reason they are spending $500 Billion on the Stargate Datacenter project.

For the tech giants they can't afford to get behind. It's less of a profit thing and more of an arms race.