- AMD’s David McAfee interviewed at CES 2026
- The executive said that the RAM crisis will not affect the stock of Radeon GPUs
- McAfee did not rule out price increases and, in fact, hinted that they were virtually inevitable, but if they occur, any cost increases should be modest.
An AMD executive has assured PC gamers that there will be no shortage of stock of its Radeon graphics cards due to the RAM crisis, but there can be no guarantee that the prices of these GPUs will not increase.
David McAfee, corporate vice president of customer channel business at AMD, was interviewed by TweakTown at CES 2026 and had some interesting revelations about Radeon GPUs and the memory crisis when it comes to VRAM.
TweakTown raised the question of the current huge increases in RAM prices and how they could affect AMD GPUs in terms of cost, or certain models being ‘put on hold’ due to supply or production difficulties in securing VRAM (all of this is happening against the notable backdrop of a ton of rumors about AMD Radeon price increases and speculation that Team Red could ditch some more affordable GPUs).
McAfee said: “Judging from what we see, we have deep, very long-term partnerships with all the DRAM manufacturers to make sure that our needs are met in terms of DRAM supply for our [Radeon] GPU, to make sure we’re building what gamers need.”
He continued: “From that standpoint, I’m not worried that the current limitations will cause a shortage of GPUs in the market. I think we have long enough, deep enough, strategic enough partnerships, and that’s a critical issue that we’re working on with those partners day in and day out.”
McAfee therefore seems confident that AMD is not going to stumble in terms of acquiring VRAM or having enough to maintain production volumes for Radeon graphics cards in the future. Of course, there is no talk of abandoning budget models.
However, TweakTown then touched on the topic of price, where the news was not so positive.
McAfee introduced the issue here by noting that AMD will do everything it can to fight price increases for its GPUs, saying: “Our value proposition with Radeon is to give end users more for their money, and as things change in the market, we want to make sure we continue to do that and deliver the best performance per dollar we can to gamers. Even despite rising component costs, we’re going to push this as aggressively as we can. To make sure we’re maximizing performance per dollar.”
However, then came the pain in the tail, with McAfee adding: “I’m not going to say that prices on all of these components will remain stable. I think inevitably something is going to happen. And we’re trying to mitigate that as much as possible to make sure we maintain that great value for end users.”
Analysis: Weathering the RAM storm
So, on the one hand, the executive says that AMD is in a good position when it comes to VRAM supply and will try to do everything possible to mitigate any price increases for Radeon GPUs to ensure that the value proposition of these products is maintained.
However, on the other hand, McAfee notably refuses to claim that there will be no price increases and further indicates that it is inevitable that “something is going to happen” on this front.
The result, then, would seem to be that some price increases are very likely, but hopefully they will be relatively contained and modest, and should not be exacerbated by stock issues.
Of course, this is just a prediction, albeit from someone within AMD who is in a very good position to make that claim (although equally, it’s obviously someone who also needs to talk about Radeon products). How the memory crisis plays out through 2026 – and quite possibly beyond – will be key, and no one really knows how it will play out in the long term yet.
In the short term, RAM price increases have been a huge shock, and not one that’s going away anytime soon. Some forecasts suggest that we won’t get back to normal with system RAM or VRAM pricing this year, and things won’t start to normalize until 2027, and others even predict a rocky road for RAM until 2028.
Elsewhere at CES 2026, other AMD executives were drawn to talk about the RAM crisis, and another noteworthy report comes from Tom’s Hardware.
Our sister site spoke to another AMD (senior) VP, Rahul Tikoo, who said of the RAM crisis: “I think the people who need the technology [a PC] They need the technology, and they are going to buy it, even though consumers might decide that they have a choice of how much memory, what CPU,” and that “consumers have a wide variety of options available at all kinds of price points that they can buy for next year.”
In short, people who has to Those buying a PC this year will have to bear the cost of more expensive RAM (that’s just a fact) and either commit to having less system memory or take shortcuts elsewhere. That’s what Tikoo’s reference to CPU choice is all about: buying a cheaper processor than expected to save money that can then be used to pay for that more expensive RAM.
Tikoo is not suggesting that this is an ideal scenario, but simply that if people has to Buying a PC this year, in this climate of rising costs, there are options, although the unspoken suggestion is that it would probably be better to wait if you had the option.
However, for those who aren’t trying to build or buy a PC and just want to upgrade their graphics card, the news is more positive for potential Radeon owners. Anyway, for the most part, although as noted, some price increases are still likely to happen in this case, but hopefully they will be minor hits and certainly nothing like what we’ve seen with RAM (which has been ridiculous, frankly).
More generally, AMD seems well prepared to weather the RAM storm this year, at least based on various comments from its top brass at CES.
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