There’s actually a huge thing stopping corporations from buying them in bulk as workstations:

They’re only sold on Steam, directly by Valve, then shipped to you.

Just like all other Valve hardware.

You… need a Steam account.

And they can very easily just say ‘one per person!’

People need to stop with this ‘companies will buy them in bulk and fuck everything up!’ line of logic.

It makes almost 0 sense.

A company would only be able to do that by setting up a system of fraudulent accounts on Steam, which would violate the TOS individually, and potentially be quite illegal collectively.

You won’t be able to buy a new Steam Machine, at Valve’s MSRP, at Walmart, or Best Buy, or NewEgg, or MicroCenter.

You might be able eventually find some on Amazon, or Walmart’s online stores, something like that, but those will be from resellers of dubious sourcing methods, and they will be charging more than MSRP.

EDIT:

Also, by your own logic, Valve could sell the Steam Machine at a loss, and make it up on increased game sales… if they could do that with the Steam Deck.

To what precise extent, who knows… but … that is your own logic there, and it still works for the Steam Machine too.

Or, they could kind of do the inverse and give you I dunno, $50 or $100 steam bucks for buying steam games, alongside buying a frame.

Basically just your Machine comes with a Steam Gift Card.

To totally clarify: I have not heard anyone official say they are or could do that… but… they could, its hardly impossible.