This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: September 19, 2026 — Steam Frame interview, killer AI models, and the DRAM crisis deepens

It's been quite a week over on Tom's Hardware Premium: let's go through all of the articles that we've published throughout this week so far.

Kicking things off with a bang, Valve officially released the Steam Frame, its latest VR headset, which adds functionality that allows the headset to act as both a standalone and PC VR headset. Our VR expert Brandon Hill reviewed the headset itself and managed to interview the engineers at Valve about their efforts on the new hardware and the software powering the company's next generation of Virtual Reality.

• Valve Steam Frame interview — why it costs up to $1,300, Snapdragon power, and 10x foveated streaming

Reporter Chris Stokel-Walker investigated the deepening DRAM and NAND crisis, honing in on how SLC and NOR Flash are the next products that have been affected by the ongoing demand for AI. Featuring expert interviews and a grim outlook on the electronics the world relies on, he explored how the ongoing data center gold rush is leaving other supply chains decimated in its wake.

• NOR Flash and SLC NAND production are under threat as capacity gets routed to more profitable products — 'severe undersupply' threatens everyday electronics

Nanya-backed company PieceMakers debuted on Taiwan's stock market this week, making a bold bet that it's not just HBM that's useful for integration in AI devices. Instead, the company offers a different look at how hybrid-bonded chips might also be useful for inference chips. We've broken down exactly how the company views the future of memory for inference accelerators.

• PieceMakers bets edge AI devices will diverge from reliance on HBM — custom-designed memory fuses DRAM stack directly to the processor using hybrid bonding

Next up, AI leaders butted heads this week over alleged safety concerns about new, advanced models. It all started with one ex-OpenAI and Anthropic worker warning that the technology could endanger human existence and 'kill us all' by 2030. In response, AI leaders like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have committed to delivering safe AI and 'pacing the frontier' of AI development, while figureheads like Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang argue against the claim that AI models would do such drastic things, so long as they are developed responsibly.

• AI leaders clash over safety fears after Anthropic whistleblower says AI could 'kill us all' by 2030 — OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI figureheads call for external governance, while Jensen Huang says worries are 'made up'

Despite the company's CEO telling us all that responsible AI development is indeed necessary, Anthropic published its economic forecasts on how widespread usage of Artificial Intelligence might impact the economy. Despite forecasting that GDP growth in the U.S. might shoot up by as much as 32%, it also warns that other 'knowledge workers' might be left in the lurch, with unemployment rising as the technology threatens to displace professional workers.

• Anthropic says AI can boost U.S. GDP by 32%, up to $44.4 trillion in four years — economics model predicts that displaced employees 'may have to switch to jobs like electrician and nurse'

An investigative report has detailed exactly how advanced AI accelerators are reaching Chinese shores through a series of shell companies. We go over the specifics of two reports and see exactly how supposedly export-controlled accelerators are allegedly being funneled through illicit channels in an economy where compute and powerful silicon create AI kingmakers.

• Investigative report details how export-restricted Nvidia AI chips reach China — public records reveal how Chinese entities skirt US sanctions

Despite the country's access to advanced AI accelerators through illicit channels, some leading frontier companies out of China are also allegedly using distillation attacks to learn how leading Western AI models think, and how extracted thinking traces and grey-market user logs are being used to train cheap models originating from the Eastern hemisphere.

• US frontier AI companies warn authorities over sophisticated distillation attacks — China warns of 'countermeasures' if America tries to constrain domestic AI models

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