If you were expecting the PlayStation 6 to arrive on the usual console timeline, it may be time to reset expectations. A new report from Bloomberg suggests Sony is considering pushing back the next PlayStation launch to 2028 or even 2029, a significant shift from the typical seven-year console cycle. Interestingly, this is something that was rumored late last year, too.

The reason is not a lack of ambition or demand. It is a global memory chip shortage driven by the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure. According to the Bloomberg report, the surge in AI data centers is consuming massive amounts of DRAM and high-bandwidth memory, leaving consumer electronics companies competing for a shrinking supply.

The AI boom is reshaping console timelines

The Bloomberg report explains that companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data centers, buying huge numbers of AI accelerators that require enormous amounts of memory. Each new generation of AI hardware uses far more RAM than traditional PCs, and that demand is expected to keep rising through the rest of the decade.

As a result, memory manufacturers are shifting production toward high-bandwidth memory for AI workloads, leaving less capacity for consumer electronics like smartphones, laptops, and game consoles. In fact, analysts warn that this supply imbalance is not temporary and could last for years, forcing companies to rethink long-term product roadmaps.

In such a scenario, delaying the PS6 may be a strategic move from Sony. Launching a new console during a period of high component costs would likely push prices higher and risk repeating the supply shortages seen during the PS5 launch. By waiting, Sony could avoid another hardware rollout plagued by limited stock and inflated prices.

That said, if the PS6 arrives later than expected, the PS5 generation will likely enjoy a longer lifespan, giving developers more time to support existing hardware and continue releasing major titles without rushing the next transition. For now, though, Sony has not officially confirmed the delay. But if these reports hold true, the next PlayStation era may take a little longer to arrive.

Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. That wasn’t just to visit Lovable, a portfolio company, but also to look for other future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.

This all came to light when news emerged that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists’ practices with admin work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion, it confirms that U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside of the U.S., even without local offices.

Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously achieved significant returns from backing Skype, cofounded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight tracked down where many of them were coming from. 

“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and knowing where innovation is emerging. In Sweden, that has meant closely tracking ecosystems like SSE Labs — the startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics — and the companies coming out of it,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.

Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Labs — a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at both the SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joined the incubator with additional backing from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mom, a dentist, had told them how admin work detracted from clinical care.

The trio intuited that they could leverage LLMs to help people like her — an idea that they also validated with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio’s initial product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren’t tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.

Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support clinicians with AI across multiple medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, focuses exclusively on dentists, but it believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion

“Now we’re a team of seven people, and we think that it’s possible to build a unified way of handling administration all over Europe, and maybe even all over the world,” Afrasiabi said. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.

Dentio prominently features its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.” It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential to VCs — a callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.

“We went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was heads down building, the word spread out. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way over to the U.S.,” he said.

This wasn’t happenstance: a16z has eyes around the world in order to spot these companies as early as local funds might, Vasquez said. “In Sweden for example, we partnered with top founders abroad like Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.”

For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investments for a16z, this isn’t just about Sweden, but about “a pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.

Born and raised in El Salvador, he has also been spending time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and across Latin America in AI,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on a phone, and ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”