Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business
127 points
3 hours ago
| 17 comments
| investors.micron.com
| HN
Animats
1 hour ago
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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.

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walterbell
35 minutes ago
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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 customer (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.

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jeffbee
24 minutes ago
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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%.
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simlevesque
14 minutes ago
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It's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
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walterbell
13 minutes ago
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It's not just retail DIMMS, most notebook and smartphone vendors are also impacted by NAND being redirected to datacenters.
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neilv
26 minutes ago
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I wonder why they didn't pull a GE, and sell/license the brand. But I'm glad they didn't.
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throwaway48476
40 minutes ago
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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.
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httpz
15 minutes ago
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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.

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RedShift1
11 minutes ago
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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.
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redbluered
2 minutes ago
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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.

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freetime2
1 hour ago
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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.

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hnuser123456
19 minutes ago
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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.
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potwinkle
37 minutes ago
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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.
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neilv
29 minutes ago
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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.)

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ZoneZealot
2 hours ago
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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.

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consumer451
52 minutes ago
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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."

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httpz
13 minutes ago
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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)
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goda90
3 minutes ago
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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.
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bpye
3 minutes ago
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I think Nvidia realises that selling GPUs to individuals is useful as it allows them to develop locally with CUDA.
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m4r1k
42 minutes ago
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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.
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lambchoppers
36 minutes ago
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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.
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elzbardico
1 hour ago
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MBA/Wall Street short term driven decision.
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AndroTux
7 minutes ago
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I’m sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.
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haunter
2 hours ago
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(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...

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delfinom
1 hour ago
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They don't need the fab for Crucial the brand.

Anything the fab outputs will feed into Micron selling to datacenters

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jijijijij
1 hour ago
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> “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.

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Y_Y
50 minutes ago
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Indeed it was naive of us not to have called that controversial medieval lull in societal progress "The First Dark Ages".
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jhack
45 minutes ago
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"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

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redbluered
1 minute ago
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Remember when AOL bought Time Warner?

I do think it's proven useful, much like the internet had in the nineties.

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t1234s
1 hour ago
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I've only ever bought crucial ram for the past 20 years.
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Simulacra
51 minutes ago
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This is very sad. Ive been using Crucial for decades, the most reliable I have ever had.
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palmotea
1 hour ago
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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.

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Night_Thastus
4 minutes ago
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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.
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