In 2018, Gabe Newell, the head of Steam, supported OpenAI with a seven-figure donation. Eight years later, the community turns this into a bitter meme, as the very AI boom he helped initiate could now increase Valve’s own hardware costs.
As PCGamer reports, Gabe Newell donated around 20 million US dollars to OpenAI in 2018 and was even an informal advisor to the company for a while, alongside founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
This became known through court documents from a lawsuit between OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Newell was thus one of the largest funders of OpenAI during its early non-profit phase.
20 million for a meme
Why is this now a meme? On Reddit, an image has been circulating for several hours that summarizes the situation quite sharply: Gabe Newell symbolically sets off a domino chain, the first tile shows his OpenAI donation from 2018, and the last, significantly larger tile claims that the new Steam Machine will be too expensive for many customers in 2026 because the AI bubble is driving hardware prices up.
You can see the meme yourself here:
The causal chain is of course not meant to be taken seriously; a single donation from 2018 cannot be directly held responsible for today’s graphics card or RAM prices. However, the core of the punchline hits a real nerve.
Memory chips and GPUs have indeed become noticeably more expensive due to the enormous demand from the AI sector, and reports indicate that the supply of RAM could even drop by up to 70 percent next year, as manufacturers prefer to invest their capacities in AI data centers (via IGN). It is therefore not completely unfounded that fans of the new Steam Machine are watching this with concern.
How is the community reacting to the donation? Under the meme, there are mainly disappointed comments about the development of OpenAI itself on Reddit. One user writes that the company has completely betrayed its original mission of developing AI safely and for the benefit of all.
Another dryly notes that more time has passed between 2018 and today than the complete duration of World War II and hopes that everyone involved has learned from this since then.
In fact, the transformation of OpenAI is well documented. What started in 2015 as a non-profit organization for open AI research is now a company with revenues in the billions, which according to current figures from partner Microsoft is still incurring double-digit billion losses (source: Heise).
The jump from a non-profit to a for-profit structure was a trigger for some early supporters and also for Elon Musk himself for the current lawsuit.
Did you think that the Steam Machine would one day also become more expensive due to Gabe Newell’s own donation? Feel free to let us know in the comments! You can find out more about Gabe Newell here: Gabe Newell invested 20 million euros in OpenAI: Today, he wouldn’t recognize the company behind ChatGPT
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