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According to the latest reports, some of the biggest motherboard manufacturers that service the gaming PC market are all adjusting their sales projections for the rest of 2026 as the current RAM and storage crisis impacts their year-on-year performance. Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock are some of the brands struggling in the current gaming PC market.
This isn't the first knock-on effect that the AI-induced RAMageddon has had on the consumer PC market. Not only have prices been higher for memory and storage, but chip suppliers like Nvidia, Intel, and AMD have purportedly shifted priorities as they service AI infrastructure rather than consumers. Some headlines suggest that PCB, used for all sorts of tech production may be under supply chain issues too, due to the Iran war as well as AI development. For now, though, the main issue facing motherboard makers is fewer people buying.
Asus is said to have shipped 15 million motherboard units in 2025, but in the first half of 2026 has only managed to shift five million. It's unlikely that the brand would be able to match its year-on-year performance from this point, even as bigger sales in the computer market tend to come with the discount season around Black Friday. In response, the brand will supposedly try to meet a target of 10 million motherboard sales by the end of 2026.
Meanwhile, Gigabyte, which sold around 11.5 million motherboard units in 2025, is trying to meet a goal of 9 million by the end of this year. MSI, which sold 11 million in 2025, will shrink to a goal of 8.4 million, and ASRock, which reached 4.3 million sold in 2025, will drop to a 2.7 million target.
These significant drops in sales go hand in hand with ~300% price rises among a lot of the best RAM for gaming, as well as price increases for SSDs. With components as costly as they are, you can understand why fewer people are choosing to build new or upgrade to more advanced gaming PCs right now.
Not only that, but CPU prices are starting to rise too, and even if that weren't true, processing chips are certainly seeing supply chain constraints as more agentic AI models are trained.
This no doubt has an impact on the GPU market too, which is still arguably a long way from recovering from its 2020 crisis. AI/enterprise GPUs are in high demand due to data center production as well, and don't forget that the best graphics cards also require memory in the form of VRAM, which will hamper production. That means a smaller supply of GPUs for consumers as AI proves to be the most important customer.
Of course, while consumer sales have shrunk, all of these brands will likely be pulling in plenty of revenue from deals with AI companies that offset the dropped sales targets. Hopefully, this doesn't result in a similar story to Micron, which shuttered its Crucial consumer brand to fully focus on AI and industry business. Either way, it's not the best time to be thinking about building a PC.
Also take a look at the best CPU for gaming, the best computer speakers, and the best gaming PC in the UK.
