Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches
- Reference: 1764803809
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/12/03/micron_cuts_crucial/
- Source link:
"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," Sumit Sadana, EVP and chief business officer at Micron, said in a canned [1]statement .
Micron will continue shipping Crucial products through the end of February 2026 and will continue to provide warranty service and support for the products after that date.
[2]
While the Crucial brand may be on death's door, there's still a chance your next laptop, prebuilt desktop, or workstation could end up having Micron-made memory on board. The chipmaker says it will continue to supply enterprise memory products to commercial channel customers going forward.
[3]
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"We would like to thank our millions of customers, hundreds of partners and all of the Micron team members who have supported the Crucial journey for the last 29 years," Sadana said in a statement to his customers who will soon have even fewer choices for memory amid a global shortage of DRAM and NAND.
[5]Amazon primed to fuse Nvidia's NVLink into 4th-gen Trainium accelerators
[6]Nvidia plows $2B into Synopsys to make GPUs a must-have for design, simulation customers
[7]Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof
[8]Memory boom-bust cycle booms again as Samsung reportedly jacks memory prices 60%
Over the past few weeks, DRAM and NAND memory prices have [9]skyrocketed in the face of unrelenting AI server demand. The market watchers at TrendForce place the blame on DRAM makers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, which it says are allocating advanced process capacity to high-end server DRAM and HBM, leaving only the spare bits for customer chips.
And it's not hard to see why. Consumer platforms at most might have 256 GB of DDR5, with most falling well below that. By comparison, GPU servers like Nvidia's HGX B300 can have more than 4 TB of memory between the CPU's DDR5 and GPU's HBM.
Counterpoint Research now expects DRAM prices could soon [10]double as chipmakers continue to prioritize the AI market, leaving a shortfall in their wake.
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It's not just DRAM either. AI is also being blamed for a shortage of NAND flash modules used in solid state media. In November, TrendForce [12]reported that average prices jumped by 20 to more than 60 percent across the various product categories with additional price hikes predicted for this month. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business?s=31
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aTEVaRlWRpXa-EiSsOk6DgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aTEVaRlWRpXa-EiSsOk6DgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aTEVaRlWRpXa-EiSsOk6DgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/amazon_nvidia_trainium/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/nvidia_synopsys_2b/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/raspberry_pi_5_1gb/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/14/samsung_price_jump/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/24/pc_memory_price_hike/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/19/commodity_memory_price_rise/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aTEVaRlWRpXa-EiSsOk6DgAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20251201-12807.html
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Damn.
That was my first thought too.
Re: Damn.
I was thinking the exact same word, damn... I remember using Kingston and Kingston ValueRAM back in the 90s before switching to Crucial(after realizing ValueRAM was just a mixture of different brands of memory chips) at some point and have been 100% crucial for everything since. Pretty much been happy the whole time past 20-25ish years.
Though I did happen to get a memory stick in a package this year that had a pair that was DOA, very surprised never had that happen to me for memory before. Crucial did replace it but it took about 6 weeks to get the replacement, fortunately I wasn't in a hurry. It took a little convincing to get them to believe the stick was DOA. It was brand new from B&H, came in a pack of 2. One stick worked fine in either slot, the other stick the system would not POST at all, in either slot.
I too don't care about RGB or overclocking, or even super high performance just want the bog standard regular stuff but want high quality, cost is less important. Though I did like the big heatsinks on the pair of Crucial Ballistix memory I got in 2019(2x4GB), I guess technically that was "overclocked" (got it for a day 0 Ryzen 3700X running Linux Mint that did nothing but handbrake encoding for 4 years). Just "retired" those memory modules earlier this year, only to install them in a refurb Dell XPS 8930 I got from ebay for one of my sister's kids for xmas.
Maybe the next obvious thing to switch to is Samsung memory? Though I've never looked into how(or if) one can acquire such memory, maybe have to go through a 3rd party brand or something..
Re: Damn.
I do seem to have spoken for us all there don't I?
I hear good things about Corsair, although they do seem to cater more to the RGB LEDs crowd, rather than boring old farts like myself. Guess I'll be giving them a try!
Re: Damn.
I've been running 32gb of Corsair Vengeance 6000/CL30 for the past 18 months and it has been rock solid. Back then it was $119 for two sticks of 16gb, now Newegg/Amazon want $427. What a time to be alive.
Re: Damn.
Same here, been all Crucial for as long as I can remember. This is a real bummer :(
Fire sales soon?
I await the AI crash, so I can buy some discount hardware.
I just hope that the AI crash doesn't crash the economy at the same time.
Re: Fire sales soon?
That’d be nice, although as someone pointed out recently here, most of the GPUs being sold by the tens of thousands for the AI South Sea Bubble lack video output ports & components, so would be near-useless for anything else.
Re: Fire sales soon?
The stripped-out memory modules will still have some value when the rest goes to landfill.
I bought my first computer from Micron many years ago. It had a Micronics motherboard. Probably did my research in Computer Shopper magazine. Times have changed since 1995.
I really hope...
...the AI bubble pops, and these price gouging assholes watch their entire market collapse and lose billions of Dollars and come begging for us to buy their surplus kit. They are all at at, so I hope they all collapse.
Damn.
After being burned countless times with other brands, ranging from (supposedly) top-tier down to aliexpress-level Scrabble-tile-named ones, I switched to Crucial about 25 years ago (eek - that’s a quarter of a century!) and have never even ONCE had a compatibility issue or failure with them in all that time.
Anyone got a recommendation for consumer-level memory brands that don’t suck? I couldn’t care less about RGB LEDs or overclocking or kewld00d branding or fancy show-off heatsinks.
Alas I have even had issues with the likes of Kingston and Samsung before now, although admittedly, many years ago before I went all-Crucial!