alt Hacker NewsMicron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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)
MBA/Wall Street short term driven decision.
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.
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.
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.
(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://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...
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.
> 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.
I’m sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.
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?
That's a shame. I liked buying RAM from them.
I hate everything about this. Nothing good is coming from this AI hype bubble.
Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.
I've only ever bought crucial ram for the past 20 years.
> “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.
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.
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.
Another Big Tech company getting hollowed out to maximize short term profits.
This is very sad. Ive been using Crucial for decades, the most reliable I have ever had.
This seems like a very short-sighted mistake...
The AI memory bubble is going to bust eventually. They have such enormous brand recognition and are known for selling a quality-first product.
To just throw that all away is insane.
For the last ten plus years I have only bought Crucial RAM. I am well beyond disapointed to hear this.