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.
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.
This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.
Diversification is resilience.
Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.
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.
(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.)
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.
Consumers are so annoying. And by consumers, I mean "anyone can get an API key for the latest model."
They announced a month ago that their upstate NY fab was delayed by 2-3 years so the painting was on the wall
https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...
Anything the fab outputs will feed into Micron selling to datacenters
"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.
I do think it's proven useful, much like the internet had in the nineties.
I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.