I don't know their breakdown for consumer vs enterprise, but the Crucial brand is consumer focussed. Obviously enterprise at this point is incredibly lucrative.
Once the bubble pops, there will be a recession, lots of regular people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford anything even IF prices come down.
Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks.
That being said, the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me was from Crucial.
In recent builds I have been using less expensive memory from other companies with varying degrees of brand recognizability, and never had a problem. And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID.
IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."
My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures.
Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint.
Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder!
I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.
That's because the SSD business was little more than a carbon copy of most other consumer non Samsung or SK/Solidigm brands. They've been phison controller with some cheap NAND flash with a different coat of paint for generations now, or in the case of the portable/external ones, that plus a 3rd party enclosure and IO module that they'd contracted out. In terms of hardware, this sub-business-unit was no more "Micron" than Corsair is (Support may be a different story). Enterprise SSD's and Consumer ones diverged years ago, and today are about as different from one another as GPU's are from CPU's.
The only real difference between Crucial RAM and Micron's unbuffered RAM was which brand's sticker they put on it, with some binning and QA on the higher-end enthusiast SKU's and a heatsink. This sub-business-unit was almost entirely redundant to Micron.
> And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
I keep seeing people say this in threads across platforms discussing this news, and it baffles me. Why?
> “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology.
"AI"-driven collapse will go down as the stupidest crisis in human history. The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet, while simultaneously neglecting existentially mandated reforms and investments, in an outrageously obvious critical moment in time ... well that's gonna dwarf even historic missteps of organized religion and island cultures.
I am calling it now:
* Cancelled: Cyberpunk.
* New lore timeline: Hypepunk > Crash-Core > Silicon Gothic
Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.
This is a big loss. Crucial offered a supply chain direct from Micron. Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.
They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up - for higher margins I’m sure. MAG7 will happily pay more but poor consumers like us can’t - this is more bad news for us.
and when the AI boom pops, Micron is going to lose out on the consumer market. This is a horrible business decision. All they had to do was increase the price.
> Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.
Large DIMM vendors are definitely not buying through middlemen.
Any vendor consuming a lot of RAM chips over a threshold will be negotiating contracts with RAM chip manufacturers. It’s not that hard even at medium scale.
Yep. I've followed Micron since before Y2k. I've seen the ups and downs of their stock. Seen a CEO literally crash and burn (RIP).
This is a mistake. The consumer business is a bet , which they excel at. Yes, its not printing money right now, but it is an option. Exiting the consumer business will mean they may miss insights into the next hot consumer trend.
The game for large companies like this should be to keep small bets going and literally, just survive. That's what Micron was doing, that's what NVIDIA did for a better part of a decade. Now that both are printing money.
Yet, Micron has decided its retiring from placing more bets. Mistake.
What is there to sell? The brand itself has value I guess, but that "Direct Access" goes out the door the second they sell it, so there's no value specifically in that to anyone else.
Crucial is primarily a Marketing and Support company, they didn't really make anything although there was a small engineering team that did DIMM/Module binning, but mostly contracted out heatsinks to glue to Micron DIMMs. On the SSD side of things, they used Phison controllers with Micron flash, just like pretty much any other consumer SSD that isn't Samsung or SK/Solidigm.
Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc don't buy components from Crucial, they get them Micron. Crucial closing their doors has no bearing on that as far as we can tell.
They probably considered dumping it on some Private Equity firm or something, but likely decided to keep the IP in case they decide to resurrect it in the future should the market landscape change.
It sucks that they're winding down crucial, but it makes sense. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't pull the trigger sooner, and by sooner I mean years sooner.
> They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.
From what I understand, OpenAI just bought out a significant proportion of the capacity of Samsung and Hynix, which is the big reason prices just spiked. They're two of the three DRAM manufacturers, Micron being the third.
That gives us a good idea as to what Micron is doing here: They have contracts with their other customers to supply DRAM at whatever price they previously negotiated, but now prices are higher, and they don't have to honor supply contracts with Crucial because they own it. So they're taking all the supply that would have gone to Crucial and selling it to the high bidder instead.
Spinning off the brand in that context doesn't work, because then "Crucial" would need to come with supply contracts or they'd have no access to supply and have nothing to sell. Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.
I think others will pick up the slack. The Chinese seem to be pretty good at producing competent Flash/DRAM products (I don't think they are behind that much). They also don't seem to be all in on the AI craze, so maybe we will buy their stuff if nothing else?
I have also bought Crucial for decades. Great quality and reliability for a fair price. Anybody doing anything semi-professional will be impacted by this questionable decision.
What a disaster for Micron. Having a consumer facing brand is 'crucial' for brand awareness. Micron is the smallest of the big 3 in DRAM and the only one in America. They're going to be swallowed up and replaced by CXMT.
You’re exactly wrong. In the race to supply AI data center, there is no “consumer” (in the sense I think you mean) making or influencing a buying decision. Without a clear path to increase supply, why take $1 when you can have $6 or $7?
Micron had infinite brand awareness in the electronics industry long before they made SSDs. Heck they don't even use their own name for those products. They've been a memory vendor for more than 40 years and they're the only vendor with US domestic memory fabs. Something tells me their future will be just fine. Disclosure: Micron stock holder.
Every low end IoT box made in china will be 'encouraged' to use CXMT aided by state subsidies. This will shrink the market for market price DRAM. When the AI bubble pops DRAM makers will discover the importance of diversification.
Almost certainly this is because of a windfall for Micron, at least in the short term. Datacenter memory demand is going through the roof, and that was where margins were highest already. It makes no sense to continue to try to milk a consumer brand that can be sold at, what, a 20% markup over generics?
Most likely Micron was planning this forever, and the current market conditions are such that it's time to pull the trigger and retool everything for GPU memory.
Micron is chasing AI glory. Their stock valuation has no room for consumer business, which is a distraction.
You can’t think about companies like it’s 2024. We’re in a gilded age with unlimited corruption… Anything can happen. They can sign a trillion dollar deal with OpenAI, get acquired by NVidia, merge with Intel, get nationalized by Trump, etc.
That's planned, not a disaster. They've deprioritized brand awareness. Siemens for instance doesn't need brand awareness, if they did, they'd pick an english name.
Considering how many people don't realize Crucial is a Micron brand, or that Micron components are in a lot of non-crucial consumer brand products, I'd argue it wasn't that crucial.
Especially considering that there's little innovation in the consumer DRAM and SSD spaces vs their enterprise counterparts that Micron can flex their talent in.
This seems a bit foolish? Even just limiting stock to paper launches and massively raising the price would let you say "oh, it's just the market" but here it makes them look like they're putting all their eggs in one basket.
Sad. I've been buying Crucial as an attempt to avoid counterfeits, both buying direct and on eBay. Every DIMM and SSD from them has been perfect so far.
(ProTip: When you see 'Crucial'-labeled DIMMs with chips that don't have the Micron 'M' logo, I wouldn't buy that, or I would send it back.)
I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)
Might almost be a good thing, if it means abandoning overhyped/underperforming high-end game rendering tech, and taking things in a different direction.
The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.
The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.
Honestly, I'd prefer it. It might get AMD and Intel more off their ass for GPU development. I already stopped buying Nvidia gpus ages ago before they saw value in the Linux/Unix market, and I'm tired of them sucking up all the air in the room.
Why would anyone sell a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us when they could sell a million GPUs for thousands apiece to a handful of big companies? We're speedrunning the absolute worst corpo cyberpunk timeline.
They will constrain supply before exiting. It's just not smart exiting, you can stop developing and it will be a trickle, also will work as insurance in case AI flops.
Their MX500 series SSDs were just king of price, performance and reliability. I even installed them in industrial PCs with intense vibrations and large temperature cycles, they're still chugging along like it's nothing.
Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro).
Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.
Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.
> This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders.
What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM?
What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.
Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.
Even less consumer supply means higher prices. What’s fascinating is the very thing that enabled AI — gaming - may be one of the early casualties as it gains in priority.
Seems foolish, I've been a long-term shareholder in Micron but this seems aimed at short-term profit maximization. So I guess I'll be a short-term shareholder now.
Nearly every pc in my current collection has Crucial ram. My main desktop has a Crucial NVME drive, and I've got 2.5in SATA SSDs from Crucial in family computers.
I don't want to have to start buying obscure keysmash chinese brands for normal looking affordable hardware.
116 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadThey announced a month ago that their upstate NY fab was delayed by 2-3 years so the painting was on the wall
https://archive.md/WSsLm
https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...
Their 'smaller' market, SSDs - has an estimated 13% of global NAND revenue.
https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and... https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-nand-mem...
I don't know their breakdown for consumer vs enterprise, but the Crucial brand is consumer focussed. Obviously enterprise at this point is incredibly lucrative.
We're gonna need a bigger pin.
I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.
What's next, a new tech allowing you to turn food into money at a rate nobody can afford to eat anymore?
They've got you coming and going.
That being said, the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me was from Crucial.
In recent builds I have been using less expensive memory from other companies with varying degrees of brand recognizability, and never had a problem. And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."
Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint.
Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder!
I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.
The only real difference between Crucial RAM and Micron's unbuffered RAM was which brand's sticker they put on it, with some binning and QA on the higher-end enthusiast SKU's and a heatsink. This sub-business-unit was almost entirely redundant to Micron.
> And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.
I keep seeing people say this in threads across platforms discussing this news, and it baffles me. Why?
"AI"-driven collapse will go down as the stupidest crisis in human history. The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet, while simultaneously neglecting existentially mandated reforms and investments, in an outrageously obvious critical moment in time ... well that's gonna dwarf even historic missteps of organized religion and island cultures.
I am calling it now:
* Cancelled: Cyberpunk.
* New lore timeline: Hypepunk > Crash-Core > Silicon Gothic
* Historian epoch title: The Dark Ages.
This is a big loss. Crucial offered a supply chain direct from Micron. Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.
https://www.klevv.com/ken/main
And don't forget about https://www.nanya.com/en/
While I never had a problem with https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/module/ , I think they will be rare/more expensive now, or 'soonish'.
For chinese CXMT and YMTC there is https://www.biwintech.com/
We live in interesting times!
(Cackling madly...)
This is like developers shifting from building homes targeted at homeowners to building build-to-rent neighborhoods for Blackrock and company xD
Large DIMM vendors are definitely not buying through middlemen.
Any vendor consuming a lot of RAM chips over a threshold will be negotiating contracts with RAM chip manufacturers. It’s not that hard even at medium scale.
This is a mistake. The consumer business is a bet , which they excel at. Yes, its not printing money right now, but it is an option. Exiting the consumer business will mean they may miss insights into the next hot consumer trend.
The game for large companies like this should be to keep small bets going and literally, just survive. That's what Micron was doing, that's what NVIDIA did for a better part of a decade. Now that both are printing money.
Yet, Micron has decided its retiring from placing more bets. Mistake.
Crucial is primarily a Marketing and Support company, they didn't really make anything although there was a small engineering team that did DIMM/Module binning, but mostly contracted out heatsinks to glue to Micron DIMMs. On the SSD side of things, they used Phison controllers with Micron flash, just like pretty much any other consumer SSD that isn't Samsung or SK/Solidigm.
Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc don't buy components from Crucial, they get them Micron. Crucial closing their doors has no bearing on that as far as we can tell.
They probably considered dumping it on some Private Equity firm or something, but likely decided to keep the IP in case they decide to resurrect it in the future should the market landscape change.
It sucks that they're winding down crucial, but it makes sense. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't pull the trigger sooner, and by sooner I mean years sooner.
From what I understand, OpenAI just bought out a significant proportion of the capacity of Samsung and Hynix, which is the big reason prices just spiked. They're two of the three DRAM manufacturers, Micron being the third.
That gives us a good idea as to what Micron is doing here: They have contracts with their other customers to supply DRAM at whatever price they previously negotiated, but now prices are higher, and they don't have to honor supply contracts with Crucial because they own it. So they're taking all the supply that would have gone to Crucial and selling it to the high bidder instead.
Spinning off the brand in that context doesn't work, because then "Crucial" would need to come with supply contracts or they'd have no access to supply and have nothing to sell. Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.
Almost certainly this is because of a windfall for Micron, at least in the short term. Datacenter memory demand is going through the roof, and that was where margins were highest already. It makes no sense to continue to try to milk a consumer brand that can be sold at, what, a 20% markup over generics?
Most likely Micron was planning this forever, and the current market conditions are such that it's time to pull the trigger and retool everything for GPU memory.
You can’t think about companies like it’s 2024. We’re in a gilded age with unlimited corruption… Anything can happen. They can sign a trillion dollar deal with OpenAI, get acquired by NVidia, merge with Intel, get nationalized by Trump, etc.
Especially considering that there's little innovation in the consumer DRAM and SSD spaces vs their enterprise counterparts that Micron can flex their talent in.
(ProTip: When you see 'Crucial'-labeled DIMMs with chips that don't have the Micron 'M' logo, I wouldn't buy that, or I would send it back.)
The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.
The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.
Instead we will be streaming games from our locked down tablets and paying a monthly subscription for the pleasure.
Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.
Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.
Diversification is resilience.
Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.
What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM?
What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.
Please explain how this is "short term" thinking.
I don't want to have to start buying obscure keysmash chinese brands for normal looking affordable hardware.
God dammit Micron.