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The original was posted on /r/pcmasterrace by /u/snackymann on 2026-05-07 16:24:33+00:00.

I keep going back and forth this.

The numbers from this week:

• ASUS: 15M boards in 2025, targeting 10M for 2026. Reportedly worse than 2008 and worse than COVID year one.
• Gigabyte: 11M down to about 8.5M
• MSI: similar ~25% drop
• ASRock: 4.3M down to 2.7M (~30% down)

The official story is “DDR5 prices spiked, builders paused.” Sure. But why did DDR5 spike? Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron redirected up to 80% of their capacity to HBM for AI accelerators. The RAM didn’t get expensive by accident. Consumer memory got deprioritized because Nvidia and the hyperscalers will pay anything for HBM and we won’t.

And here’s the part that boggles me, the motherboard makers are fine. ASUS is reportedly looking at 100% QoQ server revenue growth in Q1 2026. Gigabyte and ASRock are pivoting hard into AI server boards. The DIY market collapsing isn’t a crisis for them, it’s a rounding error next to the server money.

So my actual question:

When the people who make our parts make 10x more selling to a single hyperscaler than they do to all of us combined, what’s the realistic future of this hobby? GPUs already went this way. RTX 50 launched expensive and got more expensive, no new gen until 2028. Now boards. RAM is 2-4x what it was a year ago. CPUs reportedly next.

Are we cooked? Or is this a cycle that breaks when the AI capex bubble corrects? Because from where I’m sitting it looks like the consumer enthusiast PC isn’t being killed by lack of demand, it’s being killed by the fact that we’re the lowest-margin customer in the building, and there’s a much better customer in the next room.

Curious what people who’ve been building longer than me think. Have we been here before and will it turn around?