[HN Gopher] Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business
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Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business
Author : simlevesque
Score : 223 points
Date : 2025-12-03 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (investors.micron.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (investors.micron.com)
| haunter wrote:
| (Crucial the brand not the adjective)
|
| They 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...
| delfinom wrote:
| They don't need the fab for Crucial the brand.
|
| Anything the fab outputs will feed into Micron selling to
| datacenters
| ZoneZealot wrote:
| Micron are estimated to have 23% and 21% of global revenue for
| DRAM and HBM in Q2 2025.
|
| 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.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Tangent: this is going to happen with SOTA LLMs as well, isn't
| it.
|
| Consumers are so annoying. And by consumers, I mean "anyone can
| get an API key for the latest model."
| palmotea wrote:
| When richer people than you want things, those things can become
| unavailable to you (or at least less available).
|
| I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their
| shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| When it eventually does, they'll just come up with something
| else. Nvidia got a taste of inflated prices from the Crypto and
| then AI, and they're not going to just let that go. If nothing
| exists they'll _make_ something and hype it endlessly to try to
| keep this going.
| thway15269037 wrote:
| Then I sure hope Nvidia completely ceases to exist, like SGI,
| who, ironically, was decimated by Nvidia and cheap consumer
| hardware.
| elzbardico wrote:
| MBA/Wall Street short term driven decision.
| freetime2 wrote:
| 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.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or
| 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ
| released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of
| business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a
| fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not
| being too loyal to brand names.
| jijijijij wrote:
| > "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
|
| * Historian epoch title: The Dark Ages.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Indeed it was naive of us not to have called that controversial
| medieval lull in societal progress "The First Dark Ages".
| jijijijij wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
|
| The term is up for grabs again. Also, future historians may
| not categorize medieval times as we do. By then, libraries
| may have been converted to data centers and historic
| artifacts burned to fuel GPUs, or destroyed through
| hallucinated restoration advice. Remaining digital traces may
| have been exhaustively overwritten by verbose AI prose, or
| simply lost when AWS introduced generative DNS. In a 1000
| years, the only preserved evidence of medieval times may be
| an LLM's summary of "A Knight's Tale".
| jhack wrote:
| "The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory
| resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful
| yet"
|
| https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208
| redbluered wrote:
| Remember when AOL bought Time Warner?
|
| I do think it's proven useful, much like the internet had in
| the nineties.
| jijijijij wrote:
| Dude, that's like someone's opinion. Also neural nets doing
| pattern recognition on x-ray images is not the reason Micron
| abandoned their consumer shovel business.
| t1234s wrote:
| I've only ever bought crucial ram for the past 20 years.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of
| server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy
| client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers
| survive after driving their customers to extinction?
|
| It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to
| silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung
| and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the
| opportunity to make a counteroffer.
| jeffbee wrote:
| If you asked me to estimate the weighted fraction of clients
| accessing cloud services using devices with retail DIMMs, I
| would say much less than 1%.
| simlevesque wrote:
| It's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah but Micron is only exiting the retail business. They
| will still sell DIMMs to Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
| jeffbee wrote:
| They will probably sell Micron-label DIMMs to anyone who
| offers to buy 1000 of them.
| walterbell wrote:
| It's not just retail DIMMS, most notebook and smartphone
| vendors are also impacted by NAND being redirected to
| datacenters.
| newsclues wrote:
| Devices like smartphones and tablets that are locked down
| will continue to exist.
|
| It's these pesky pc things that people do bad things like
| piracy with/s
| venturecruelty wrote:
| We can prevent this from happening by enforcing 100-year-old
| antitrust laws.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| Antitrust laws don't work because they're subjective and
| are enforced by political appointees.
|
| The simpler solution is a _tax on scale_ -- basically a
| graduated corporate income tax, aggregated across any group
| of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria.
|
| Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it.
| Very little wiggle room.
|
| If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of
| its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial
| incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to split the
| company up.
|
| [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1
| neilv wrote:
| I wonder why they didn't pull a GE, and sell/license the brand.
| But I'm glad they didn't.
| Yokolos wrote:
| Why would anybody buy it? This is a bad sign for consumer
| memory in general. It's more likely we're going to see more
| exits from this segment instead.
| neilv wrote:
| I guess no Chinese interest wanted to buy it, to jumpstart
| a favored brand that's a step above random-name when people
| are picking which to buy on Amazon. Or wasn't willing to
| pay enough for it.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| There is KLEVV, the outlet of SK Hynix. They are crass!
|
| 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...)
| Simulacra wrote:
| This is very sad. Ive been using Crucial for decades, the most
| reliable I have ever had.
| m4r1k wrote:
| 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.
| lambchoppers wrote:
| If you are going to sell shovels for a gold rush its pretty
| silly to keep rational market compatibility on things like
| prices, defect rate, packaging, correct contents.. Probably
| better to spare the brand (for a reboot?) and also not compete
| as much with all that junk when it shows up again on eBay.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| 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.
| httpz wrote:
| The brand aware "consumers" are really just DIY PC builders,
| which is relatively a small number. Enterprise DRAM business is
| doing so great that Micron just doesn't see the consumer market
| is worth chasing.
|
| This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are
| skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer
| DRAM.
| theelous3 wrote:
| The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not
| aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer
| markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's
| jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect.
| It's not like a clothing brand or something.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| 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?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| https://www.biwintech.com/
| potwinkle wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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.)
| httpz wrote:
| 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)
| goda90 wrote:
| They are already making moves that might suggest that future.
| They are going to stop packaging VRAM with their GPUs shipped
| to third-party graphics card makers, who will have to source
| their own, probably at higher cost.
| bpye wrote:
| I think Nvidia realises that selling GPUs to individuals is
| useful as it allows them to develop locally with CUDA.
| tomasphan wrote:
| There is a couple reasons why Jensen won't take off the gaming
| leather jacket just yet:
|
| 1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards.
| Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.
|
| 2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep
| them from growing their way into data centers.
|
| 3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring)
|
| 4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs
| millions)
|
| 5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy
| ARM)
| BizarroLand wrote:
| 6. Techies who use NVidia GPUs in their PCs are more likely
| to play with AI and ultimately contributing to the space as
| either a developer or a user
| bluescrn wrote:
| 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.
| swinglock wrote:
| The latest DLSS and FSR are good actually. Maybe XeSS too.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've
| reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional
| rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most
| gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors.
|
| Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a
| problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark
| Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only
| accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better
| results than any raster GI solution would do with the same
| budget.
| officeplant wrote:
| 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.
| CTDOCodebases wrote:
| The way things are going no one will be able to afford a PC.
|
| Instead we will be streaming games from our locked down tablets
| and paying a monthly subscription for the pleasure.
| 20after4 wrote:
| You will own nothing and be happy.
| venturecruelty wrote:
| 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.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| 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.
| tkfoss wrote:
| Just bought one last week, sadly not many options left for 2.5"
| SSDs
| AndroTux wrote:
| I'm sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Can tell if sarcastic.
| redbluered wrote:
| This will surely maximize quarterly profits until the next cloud
| or AI bust.
|
| Diversification is resilience.
|
| Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be
| written about in business books.
| jakebasile wrote:
| > 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.
| x0x0 wrote:
| secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term
| trend.
|
| And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion
| dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return
| anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government
| bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we
| care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is
| basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year
| and putting it into ai.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| >Is there religious DRAM?
|
| RAM optimized for TempleOS and Holy-C
| ruralfam wrote:
| Ah let my ask my new nerdy friend gemini3. Prompt: can you
| improve this text using plain english: 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.
|
| Response (who said recently AI cannot do comedy):
|
| Here are a few ways to rewrite this text using plain English,
| depending on how formal you want to be.
|
| The original text relies heavily on corporate jargon like
| "secular growth vectors," "portfolio transformation," and
| "create value." The rewrites below aim to make these concepts
| concrete.
|
| ### Option 1: Professional & Direct (Best for reports or press)
| > "Micron is shifting its strategy to focus on the most
| profitable, long-term growth areas in memory and storage. By
| targeting business and enterprise customers, the company aims
| to boost its long-term performance and deliver better results
| for customers and shareholders."
|
| ### Option 2: Concise (Best for quick updates) > "Micron is
| refocusing on high-growth memory and storage markets to improve
| long-term profits. By concentrating on business customers
| rather than consumers, the company plans to create more value
| for its investors and clients."
|
| ### Option 3: Simple & Conversational (Best for spoken
| explanations) > "This decision is part of Micron's plan to
| change what we sell. We are focusing on business markets where
| we see steady, long-term growth. This will help us run a better
| business and help our customers and investors succeed."
|
| ---
|
| ### Key Changes Made
|
| * *"Ongoing portfolio transformation"* Changed to *"shifting
| its strategy"* or *"changing what we sell."* This clarifies
| that the company is changing its mix of products. *
| *"Secular... growth vectors"* Changed to *"long-term growth
| areas."* In finance, "secular" refers to trends that last a
| long time (as opposed to seasonal trends), but in plain
| English, it is often confusing. * *"Core enterprise and
| commercial segments"* Changed to *"business and enterprise
| customers."* This clarifies who they are selling to.
|
| *Would you like me to shorten this further for a slide deck or
| a specific headline?*
| venturecruelty wrote:
| I consulted my paper dictionary, which doesn't use as much
| electricity as Belgium or thousands of gallons of water, and
| it reads: "of or relating to a long term of indefinite
| duration: <secular inflation>, <A secular increase in the
| quantity of money is required in a growing economy... -
| Milton Friedman>".
| 20after4 wrote:
| 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.
| umanwizard wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/secular
| alecco wrote:
| Another Big Tech company getting hollowed out to maximize short
| term profits.
| listenallyall wrote:
| This brand has existed for what, 20+ years? You dont think they
| can look at long-term trendlines of revenue and expenses?
|
| Please explain how this is "short term" thinking.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| 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.
| aeternum wrote:
| 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.
| officeplant wrote:
| 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.
|
| God dammit Micron.
| Crontab wrote:
| That's a shame. I liked buying RAM from them.
| goo wrote:
| Micron leadership probably just heard about Roko's basilisk.
| shirro wrote:
| Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I
| expect the people running these companies are more interested
| in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of
| the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.
| MisterTea wrote:
| I hate everything about this. Nothing good is coming from this AI
| hype bubble.
| shirro wrote:
| Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Uh shite. That's the goto for ssds with capacitors on, such that
| when the power dies they're able to leave things in a reasonable
| state.
|
| All the samsung ones I've tried have died within a year. Fast
| until they died I suppose.
|
| Any recommendations for nvme in a post-micron world?
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(page generated 2025-12-03 23:00 UTC)