As RAM prices explode and availability becomes an issue thanks to AI companies, Micron announced their Crucial consumer business is no longer a thing.
Sent out in a press release today Micron said they’ve decided to “exit the Crucial consumer business, including the sale of Crucial consumer-branded products at key retailers, e-tailers and distributors worldwide”. Shipments will continue until the end of February 2026 - but after that, it’s over as they will “continue to support the sale of Micron-branded enterprise products to commercial channel customers globally”.
As for why? You probably guessed it - AI! From the press release:
“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. “Thanks to a passionate community of consumers, the Crucial brand has become synonymous with technical leadership, quality and reliability of leading-edge memory and storage products. We would like to thank our millions of customers, hundreds of partners and all of the Micron team members who have supported the Crucial journey for the last 29 years.”
Crucial did RAM and SSDs, so all of it will be going away from us lowly consumers.
That headline works whether or not that C is capitalized, heh…
Looks like Micron decided that consumers weren’t crucial to their business.
*laugh track*
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Nah that comes next year
Touche good sir/ma’am!
I am aware how it’s spelt. Typo on mobile. :)
Remember this when the bubble bursts and they come begging for consumer dollars again.
And by then they will have had their millions in bonuses and they know most people will be buying their crap when the bubble bursts because most of people have the memory of a goldfish.
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Happened in 2000
All right, I’ll skip them when they come back after AI pops.
I don’t think people are fully seeing how catastrophic this is going to be.
Isn’t it sort of already normal to know that all this ai bullshit is a bubble? So why would a gigantic company join at this time?
I concluded they don’t care because they will make a quick profit and will be bailed out when things go wrong, so the question would be “why not?” …
The bubble isn’t in manufacturing itself. Evident by the way everyone here including myself is sad we cannot get reasonably priced new silicon anymore. There will always be demand for manufacturing. They are simply getting higher profit margin customers right now.
We are seeing the silicon engineer’s response to the AI hype hit the market which is a big reason production is being taken up. But there is no reason to think the AI ASICs (or accelerators of various flavors) will all fail at this stage. They are unlikely to even bring GPU prices down anytime soon either. It all sucks so much unless you are an asset holder in silicon.
With AI cameras and robots on the rise there really is no looking back…
They’re gamblers and con men. People that get to controlling positions in these businesses generally don’t do it by being reasonable and responsible with the people under them, money or ethics.
Lets see how far it goes if AI starts failing…or even if another company can produce faster than they can.
if another company can produce faster than they can.
micron wasn’t just a designer and builder of these products… they also have their own fabs. there are only a few companies that actually produce the RAM and NAND chips used in these products. micron was one of them. the other 2 big ones are skhynix and samsung…
someone please correct me if i’m wrong, but this seems like a massive manufacturing gap that needs to be filled. it’s not easy to just find a new supply of chips.
Its not the first that this has come up, either. IIRC a tsunami massively impacted DDR4 production, i remember the 2x16GB kit that i bought months before had gone up to $500+ USD.
Oh, I was wondering why RAM prices seemed so much higher. Its been ~4 years since I looked and gaslit myself into thinking my brain was just going bad.
Glad to see I wasn’t just imagining it.
You’re glad this is the reality we live in?
Lol, suppose not.
But I’m glad at least I’m not crazy while living in this reality (though I suppose it my be less painful that way).
Ignorance isn’t bliss when you’re living in an objectively crazy world. At that point, you either internalise all the craziness and believe it’s in your head, or you look up and recognise that it’s the world that’s nuts. I’d prefer not to live in such a world, but given that I do, I might as well not be in denial about it.
