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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 consum
by Animats 11mo ago
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.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- walterbell 11mo agoShould 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 holding company (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.
- jeffbee 11mo agoIf 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%.
- simlevesque 11mo agoIt's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
- wmf 11mo agoYeah but Micron is only exiting the retail business. They will still sell DIMMs to Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
- jeffbee 11mo agoThey will probably sell Micron-label DIMMs to anyone who offers to buy 1000 of them.
- londons_explore 11mo agoThis. And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc. A consumer facing business is a lot of overhead, and since more and more hardware now has soldered ram, it is a shrinking business too. Shrinking businesses are super hard to run - it's far easier to grow a business than shrink it whilst maintaining the same margins.
- derefr 11mo ago> And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc. When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.
- walterbell 11mo agoIt's not just retail DIMMS, most notebook and smartphone vendors are also impacted by NAND being redirected to datacenters.
- newsclues 11mo agoDevices like smartphones and tablets that are locked down will continue to exist. It’s these pesky pc things that people do bad things like piracy with/s
- venturecruelty 11mo agoWe can prevent this from happening by enforcing 100-year-old antitrust laws.
- octoberfranklin 11mo agoAntitrust laws don't work because they're subjective and are enforced by political appointees. The simpler solution is a tax on scale -- a graduated corporate revenue tax, aggregated across any group of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria. Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it. Very little wiggle room. If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to do so. [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.52-1
- snsosjsjbs 11mo ago[flagged]
- pogue 11mo ago> Religion, nationalism, race, etc are the correct ways and historically successful ways to deal with this What??
- snsosjsjbs 11mo ago[flagged]
- cogman10 11mo agoI don't think that works in the situation of fabs. They are big and expensive pieces of tech with the latest fabs being the most expensive to construct. You can't exactly break up a chip manufacturer when they have just 1 or 2 plants tooled for the latest memory. IMO, recognizing chip fabrication as a national security asset and turning it into a public corporation would be the better way to go. Let the likes of intel/amd/or micron continue developing chips. But also, take control of the most expensive and risky part of chip manufacturing to make sure we don't fall behind due to corporate budget cuts. You also keep and continue to build expertise in a vital part of modern society.
- fn-mote 11mo agoThese suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics. This isn’t antitrust because the companies aren’t reselling it to you at a much higher price after cornering the market (cough cough Ticketmaster & scalpers).
- overfeed 11mo ago> These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics Perhaps the limited competition caused by 25+ memory manufacturers consolidating down to a 3-member cartel is a sign of market failure. I use "cartel" deservedly, as the RAM manufacturers were found guilty of price-fixing in multiple times in the past.
- Libidinalecon 11mo ago"The market is always right" -Thoughtless, deluded, Homo economicus religion, idiot
- mikestorrent 11mo agoWhat if we realize that 8 GB of memory is actually a tremendous amount, and experience a resurgence in desktop operating systems as people begin to prioritize memory for productive computation again instead of using up a gigabyte for a chat client?
- walterbell 11mo agoPhones are already memory constrained and affected by artificial NAND shortage, it's not specific to one form factor.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> Should countries have an 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? You mean a central planning, command and control economy? There is a lot of history of countries trying these things and they don’t have the outcome you want. DRAM manufacturing is a global business. If one country starts imposing purchase limits for whatever reason, the DRAM consumers are going to laugh as they move their data centers and operations to another country that doesn’t try to impose their laws on a global market. > It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (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. Good news: That’s not how markets work. DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. Contracts are negotiated. Market prices fluctuate. No supplier of anything is going to let all of their inventory disappear to one buyer without letting the market have a chance to bid the price higher.
- walterbell 11mo ago> DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46143535 Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more...but at the end of the day - OpenAI did succeed in keeping the circles tight, locking down the NDAs, and leveraging the fact that these companies assumed the other wasn’t giving up this much wafer volume simultaneously…in order to make a surgical strike on the global RAM supply chain.. https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-surge https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su... The Chinese government directed CXMT to convert production from DDR4 to DDR5 as soon as the company was able. The order was said to have been given in the 4th quarter of 2024, and the price transition changed from a decrease to an increase in the middle of March 2025.. A wholesale conversion from DDR4 to DDR5 would probably be very expensive to perform, and would thus be unusual for a company that was focused on profitability. As a government-owned company, CXMT does not need to consistently turn a profit, and this was a factor in the government’s decision to suddenly switch from DDR4 to DDR5.
- neilv 11mo agoI wonder why they didn't pull a GE, and sell/license the brand. But I'm glad they didn't.
- Yokolos 11mo agoWhy would anybody buy it? This is a bad sign for consumer memory in general. It's more likely we're going to see more exits from this segment instead.
- neilv 11mo agoI guess no Chinese interest wanted to buy it, to jumpstart a favored brand that's a step above random-name when people are picking which to buy on Amazon. Or wasn't willing to pay enough for it.
- pmontra 11mo agoMaybe they keep the brand to resurrect it some years in the future when the surge of data centers has faded away and they'll have to find custumers between consumers.
- neilv 11mo agoI like this theory. I'd forgotten that of course a company like that thinks further into the future than many software companies do/can.
- LargoLasskhyfv 11mo agoThere is KLEVV, the outlet of SK Hynix. They are crass! https://www.klevv.com/ken/main https://www.klevv.com/ken/main And don't forget about https://www.nanya.com/en/ https://www.nanya.com/en/ While I never had a problem with https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/module/ https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/module/ , I think they will be rare/more expensive now, or 'soonish'. For chinese CXMT and YMTC there is https://www.biwintech.com/ https://www.biwintech.com/ We live in interesting times! (Cackling madly...)
- addaon 11mo agoStrange that Klevv is putting RGB LEDs on DIMMs, and Samsung isn't. Where does Samsung plan to put the advertisements?
- Panzer04 11mo agohuh, that explains why they always seem to sell the best 6000CL30 RAM.
- kvemkon 11mo ago> KLEVV Just looked at standard desktop: still no 64GB 5600MT/s modules. CUDIMMs are missing 32GB. > And don't forget about Nanya BTW, what is the status of Elpida now?
- chupasaurus 11mo agoMostly R&D.
- tarlinian 11mo agoElpida was purchased by Micron after the financial crisis (they bought it out of bankdruptcy for a swan song in 2013). Much of the Micron DRAM you might buy is made at the former Elipida fab in Hiroshima.
- _cenw 11mo agoHynix also started selling consumer SSDs with "SK Hynix" branding like 2-3 years ago. I guess we'll see how long that lasts.
- sheepscreek 11mo agoThey are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up - for higher margins I’m sure. MAG7 will happily pay more but poor consumers like us can’t - this is more bad news for us.
- UncleOxidant 11mo agoWondering if we're going to have a situation in the future where we end up having to buy the hand-me-downs from industry after they're done with them (and thus kind of outdated tech)? Kind of seems like the days of building your own PC are numbered.
- ghostly_s 11mo agoThis is already happening in the NAS HDD space. Prices on new units have been stagnant or rising for a couple years now.
- ethbr1 11mo agoIt's been happening in all spaces. There are reputable eBay sellers shipping decomm'd previous-gen servers for bargain basement prices. If you're fine running last gen (and you should be, for home lab use) then it's worth it to monitor prices over time. They typically hit a floor, as supply from decomm waves coinciding swamps demand, but the resellers still want to move things as quickly as possible.
- dawnerd 11mo agoHonestly, it's actually pretty awesome the deals you can get on used enterprise gear.
- tehlike 11mo agoAt the cost of power consumption. My small homelab is already at 600Ws which is around 290$/mo in california.
- knowitnone3 11mo agoand when the AI boom pops, Micron is going to lose out on the consumer market. This is a horrible business decision. All they had to do was increase the price.
- fransje26 11mo agoPop already! Let's get all this nonsense over with.
- hammock 11mo agoExiting the market. Not abandoning the factories. They will be retooled for AI market, which is more profitable. This is like developers shifting from building homes targeted at homeowners to building build-to-rent neighborhoods for Blackrock and company xD
- sakompella 11mo agonotably, Blackrock doesn't actually have any stake in housing. Plenty of other private equity firms do, of course.
- adolph 11mo agoHave you ever confused BlackRock with Blackstone? Despite their similar sounding names, these two financial powerhouses represent distinct approaches to investment management. https://www.investing.com/academy/trading/blackrock-vs-blackstone/ https://www.investing.com/academy/trading/blackrock-vs-black... Major news organizations and sector researchers describe the claim as unfounded and often rooted in confusion between BlackRock Inc. and the private-equity firm Blackstone Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock_house-buying_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock_house-buying_conspir...
- hammock 11mo agoThanks boss, they were the same company for a while and then got spun off. There is so much confusion that AI even has a hard time keeping them straight if you aren’t careful. Anyway it doesn’t matter the name for the purpose of my argument. And lol at “unfounded conspiracy theory” it’s only a “conspiracy” that Blackrock is buying homes (crucially, no one is actually suggesting that, except the people who are confused between Blackrock and Blackstone), because Blackstone definitely is buying homes.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted. Large DIMM vendors are definitely not buying through middlemen. Any vendor consuming a lot of RAM chips over a threshold will be negotiating contracts with RAM chip manufacturers. It’s not that hard even at medium scale.
- IG_Semmelweiss 11mo agoYep. I've followed Micron since before Y2k. I've seen the ups and downs of their stock. Seen a CEO literally crash and burn (RIP). This is a mistake. The consumer business is a bet , which they excel at. Yes, its not printing money right now, but it is an option. Exiting the consumer business will mean they may miss insights into the next hot consumer trend. The game for large companies like this should be to keep small bets going and literally, just survive. That's what Micron was doing, that's what NVIDIA did for a better part of a decade. Now that both are printing money. Yet, Micron has decided its retiring from placing more bets. Mistake.
- 0manrho 11mo agoWhat is there to sell? The brand itself has value I guess, but that "Direct Access" goes out the door the second they sell it, so there's no value specifically in that to anyone else. Crucial is primarily a Marketing and Support company, they didn't really make anything although there was a small engineering team that did DIMM/Module binning, but mostly contracted out heatsinks to glue to Micron DIMMs. On the SSD side of things, they used Phison controllers with Micron flash, just like pretty much any other consumer SSD that isn't Samsung or SK/Solidigm. Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc don't buy components from Crucial, they get them Micron. Crucial closing their doors has no bearing on that as far as we can tell. They probably considered dumping it on some Private Equity firm or something, but likely decided to keep the IP in case they decide to resurrect it in the future should the market landscape change. It sucks that they're winding down crucial, but it makes sense. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't pull the trigger sooner, and by sooner I mean years sooner.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago> They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it. From what I understand, OpenAI just bought out a significant proportion of the capacity of Samsung and Hynix, which is the big reason prices just spiked. They're two of the three DRAM manufacturers, Micron being the third. That gives us a good idea as to what Micron is doing here: They have contracts with their other customers to supply DRAM at whatever price they previously negotiated, but now prices are higher, and they don't have to honor supply contracts with Crucial because they own it. So they're taking all the supply that would have gone to Crucial and selling it to the high bidder instead. Spinning off the brand in that context doesn't work, because then "Crucial" would need to come with supply contracts or they'd have no access to supply and have nothing to sell. Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.
- ethbr1 11mo ago> Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it. Why not just announce limited supply, then, instead of exiting? This seems like a "automaker invests more in financing arm, because it's the most profitable" concentration mistake, towards an industry with wide concerns over intermediate term financial sustainability.
- poloniculmov 11mo agoThey can spin it back up once the bubble pops.
- mdnahas 11mo agoThe announcement doesn’t say that they’re selling the Crucial brand. And it’s a valuable brand. So, I agree, they will wait for the bubble to pop and then start it back up. I assume the higher prices let them keep the operation around in mothballs and the employees working elsewhere in the company.
- torginus 11mo agoI think others will pick up the slack. The Chinese seem to be pretty good at producing competent Flash/DRAM products (I don't think they are behind that much). They also don't seem to be all in on the AI craze, so maybe we will buy their stuff if nothing else?