Nvidia has raised the price of the Shield TV Pro by $100, effective immediately, moving the streaming box from $199.99 to $299.99. The company attributes the increase directly to the AI-driven surge in memory and component costs — even for a device built around silicon that debuted seven years ago.

The price change takes effect on October 2. "Starting October 2, SHIELD Pro will be priced at $299. The cost of components, including memory, has increased substantially across the industry," an Nvidia spokesperson told Ars Technica.

The current Shield TV Pro is the 2019 revision, launched alongside a non-Pro variant at $149.99, with the Pro carrying a $199.99 sticker at debut. Both models run Android TV and built their reputation on AI upscaling and hardware decoding for nearly every media format in common use. The heart of the box is the Tegra X1+ processor — aging silicon by any measure, but still fast enough for a TV media streamer, then and now. Nvidia has since discontinued the non-Pro model, leaving the Shield TV Pro as the sole survivor of the line, now at a 50 percent higher price than its launch MSRP.

The commercial logic behind the increase is straightforward. The generative AI buildout has scrambled technology supply chains, and memory plus storage have become the pressure points. The unwritten rule of the current market cycle is blunt: if a device contains memory or storage, its cost basis is rising. Nvidia's confirmation makes clear that even a product whose core SoC dates back years does not escape that arithmetic — the bill of materials beyond the processor is where the inflation bites.

For consumers, the Shield TV Pro case is a useful marker of how far component inflation has traveled beyond data centers. This is not a cutting-edge GPU or a flagship smartphone absorbing scarce HBM. It is a streaming box with a 2019-era Tegra chip, and the memory inside it now costs enough to force a $100 increase on a mature, largely unchanged product.

The move also signals that Nvidia sees no near-term relief in memory pricing. Raising prices on a seven-year-old consumer device — a step few vendors take on legacy hardware — suggests the company expects elevated component costs to persist rather than wash out over a quarter or two. If memory and storage tightness continues to ripple through the supply chain, the Shield TV Pro is unlikely to be the last mature product to get repriced upward.