Here is one that I did not have on the bingo card today. Micron announced that it is exiting its Crucial consumer business. With DDR5 memory prices skyrocketing due to AI demand, it looks like Crucial is going to be a victim.
Micron Closing Crucial
I know many of you will think this is not real, so here is a quote from Micron on this one:
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. (Source: Micron)
From that, it seems like Micron is going to focus on the large-scale AI customers. Having fewer, larger customers has many benefits for an organization like Micron, since it reduces the footprint needed to service customers. For example, handling warranties for a smaller set of customers is easier than handling them for customers who recently purchased a Crucial product. The counterpoint is that fewer big customers are riskier than having many smaller customers.
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. (Source: Micron)
For fun, I took a quick look and the last Crucial product we reviewed was the Crucial X10 2TB Portable SSD Review a few months ago.
The first Crucial review I could find on STH was the Crucial M500 120GB mSATA Benchmarks and Review from 2014.
This is one of those iconic brands in the industry that has been around since 1996.
Final Words
It makes you wonder how long other companies will stay in the consumer market if they feel that demand on the data center side is strong enough. While this might be a good sign for a company like Kingston, reducing competition, it might also be a sign of things to come if Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix de-prioritize the consumer markets outside of prominent OEMs. DDR5 pricing might not be on the way down too soon.
The AI Mega Buildout is like the Borg in StarTrek “Your IT supply chain will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
I purchased a 64GB UDIMM x2 kit earlier this Summer (for my AM5 EPYC build), and it now seems like a fortuitous buy.
Un-fortunately, I bought a Corsair Kit (which leaves some doubt in my mind if I ever have to seek a warrantied replacement).
Not that I am expecting failure, but . . . .
F’ing AI. First it was driving the price of graphics cards through the roof. Now it’s doing the same thing with RAM. Not to mention raising consumer’s electric rates because of the buildouts utilities are having to do for datacenters.
Where’s the 2nd source for this? It’s just rumor until you’ve second sourced news like this
Well, that’s upsetting. Crucial have been my go-to for storage since consumer SSDs were a thing. AI out there just ruining everything, and all we have to look forward to is the bursting of the bubble and the associated stock market crash.
Micron is making a massive mistake doing this. They will probably see short term gains, but long term this is going to backfire.
With everything being scooped up for datacenter/AI use, it’s not going to leave anything for consumers at this rate. People are going to wind up holding on to their current PCs longer than they otherwise would.
Once this hits the GPU market, gamers will either pay stupid sums of money or just stick with what they have. Game devs may stop seeing that assistance from nVidia and AMD as they won’t have many if any new consumer level card offerings until/if this datacenter madness subsides.
i am wondering when AI bubble will collapse..??
This is such a betrayal, they go straight to the permanent boycott list.
This is very disappointing news, yet another casualty of the ai bubble and businesses trading long term success for short term profits.
Wow, a sign of the times. The AIpocalypse just mercilessly ate up Crucial by Micron the same as it’s been eating everything else up. A shame given that I bought a P3 Plus, BX500 and 64 GB DDR4 memory kit to upgrade my laptop ahead of the death of Windows 10 and a move to Linux in response. Maybe Micron’ll survive, but I fear like others here that the short-term gains now will kill them later. Micron had what I felt were decent quality products at reasonably affordable prices, hence why I bought two 4 TB SSDs and 64 GB of DDR4 RAM as worthy upgrades. Oh well, I guess I’m not going to be able to buy anything more from them in the future. Anybody got any suggestions as to what brands will be decent enough replacements for CbM RAM and SSDs should I ever need to upgrade more in the future?
I bought 2x of the 128GB kits for my AMD 9000 series desktop earlier this year.
I’m glad to have the 256GB of RAM, and now I’m sad that the warranty just vanished due to a corporate announcement.
“Micron has made the difficult decision”, that will increase their stock value and short-term profits at the expense of the very same people, whose taxes subsidize their factories. (what was it, 6 billions from CHIPS act alone?)
I’m bearish on the AI bubble, but Micron doesn’t make that significant an announcement if the financials weren’t there. I always felt Crucial was an after thought to the Micron flagship products.
The way I see it this either this fails spectacularly and we’re all buying tickets to China by Christmas next year, or the US government and US military applications are about to get reaaaal crazy over the next few years…
AI is going to crash hard, just like the dot.com bust, for those old enough to remember those excesses, and those not old enough, do your homework and research it. The issue is now that consumers are going to be left holding the bag when all these data centers close, and all the excess power generators still having to be paid for even when the excess electricity to run the AI data centers is no longer needed. Not to mention the excess hardware, cabling, and toxic metals inside. The job losses to communities and all the tax give aways will be crippling to local governments as well. I really hope that I am wrong.