Forget working less – AI is making fun more expensive

Jan Johannsen

12.3.2026

Translation: Veronica Bielawski

We were promised AI would take annoying work off our hands. Instead, corporations betting on profits from AI services are making gaming and other hobbies more expensive. Enough is enough!

I’m eagerly waiting for the supposed AI bubble to finally burst. Not out of morbid curiosity or a love of chaos, mind you. I’m just sick of the unimaginably high levels of investment in AI hardware pushing memory prices up for everyone.

Forget working less

It sounds absurd: when announcing his move to OpenAI, Peter Steinberger – single-handedly responsible for OpenClaw, the latest AI fad OpenClaw – complained about Europe’s labour protection laws. Apparently, only in the US can he spend an adequate amount of time programming without having to bother about break rules and the like. What can I say other than enjoy the resulting karoshi! I always thought AI was supposed to lighten our workload. And it supposedly really is especially helpful when it comes to coding.

What’s clear is that right now, AI is mainly changing jobs – and even creating new ones. Someone has to enter the right prompts, plan and build data centres, tag material by hand in painstaking detail so the AI can recognise what it’s looking at in the first place. The latest example is the footage from Meta’s smart glasses being reviewed by workers in Kenya (link in German).

So far, the jobs under threat are mainly creative ones – and those are exactly the jobs that are more enjoyable than putting together Excel spreadsheets. The book market is being flooded with AI-written texts and AI-generated illustrations, though some publishers have already realised that «AI-free» can be a selling point.

AI data centres are taking memory away from my toys

Around the turn of the year, my colleague Martin Jud built himself a living room PC – a Linux-based high-end system that makes the PS5 and similar machines look downright old. Luckily for him, he’d been planning the project for a while and bought the components before memory prices shot up. Right now, he’d be paying CHF 787 or EUR 814 for the 64 gigabytes of RAM alone. That’s more than the most expensive version of the PlayStation 5 Pro! Gaming PCs have always been more expensive than consoles. But to pay twice as much for the RAM alone as for the base model of the PS5?! That just takes the fun out of gaming.

In light of the current AI hype, some memory manufacturers have already sold off their entire 2026 output – long before it has even left the factory. Others are going so far as to shut down their consumer brands and produce only for business customers with money to burn. As a result, prices are rising for everyone. And that’s not just for individuals buying hard drives or RAM to build their own PCs. Finished products are getting more expensive too – from laptops and games consoles to NAS systems and smartphones.

At MWC in Barcelona, the word behind the scenes was that one manufacturer cancelled a planned smartphone launch because the target entry-level price was made impossible to achieve. Against that backdrop, the Nothing Phone (4a) got off lightly with a ten-per-cent price increase over its predecessor. Samsung is in a similar range with the S26 series compared with last year’s models.

And yet, even price increases don’t seem to be a viable solution in all cases. Valve wants to sell a finished device in the vein of the one my colleague Martin built himself for his living room. So what’s the problem? The Steam Machine, which was unveiled in November 2025, still doesn’t have a price tag. Faced with the memory shortage, the manufacturer keeps delaying the sales launch and is now unsure whether it’ll even happen this year.

According to some manufacturers’ forecasts, the current memory shortage could last until 2028. And that estimate dates back to before the Iran war, which has placed even more strain on global supply chains. Samsung and SK Hynix, for example, source a large share of helium, used for cooling during memory production, from Qatar (link in German). That’s bad news for anyone looking to buy new hardware. I’ve already put my plans to buy a NAS on hold.

Where’s the needle to pop the bubble?

I’m not kidding myself. I know AI is here to stay. But the hype will end at some point – and I hope it’ll be sooner rather than later. I’m open to ideas on how we can make the bubble burst faster. Given the amount of money involved, it’d make no difference even if we all dumped all our personal shares in Nvidia, Microsoft and the like. That would be just as pointless as refusing to use AI – a mere drop in the ocean. Government institutions and business customers matter far more than private, likely non-paying, accounts.

So all I can do is hope my current tech lasts until memory prices return to normal. If I do need to buy something new, I’ll think very carefully about where I spend my money. Repairability will also be a bigger factor. That way, if one component gets damaged, I can simply replace it instead of having to buy a whole new device.

Jan Johannsen

Senior Editor

Jan.Johannsen@galaxus.de

As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus. more

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