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.
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.
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.
Because it would be a lie. The amount of supply they're planning to allocate to Crucial in the near future is zero. Keeping the website up as a place you can go and order nothing would only mislead people into thinking they should come back in a few days when they're restocked, when that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
> 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.
Their business is manufacturing DRAM. Also selling it at retail makes sense most of the time because they get the retailer's margin too, but it doesn't right now, and that's the side business.
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.
I don't know if I'd buy any of the servers or older computers but the internal components are pretty dang good. Stuff like hard drives, network cards, hbas, that's the real money saver right there.
I upgraded my home rack to use cx3 cards, and I sport a ds4246 that has a single 18tb sas hard drive in it lol.
Kind of cool I have 56gbps network between them, tho I can only get 30gbps at max in iperf3 lol (due to some pcie bw limit)
Unfortunately Weird Stuff is a thing of the past, though this had less to do with a reduced supply of surplus and more to do with Silicon Valley’s high real estate prices. Thankfully there are still good stuff to be found at e-waste recyclers, but if more companies are relying on the cloud, and if more devices are integrated boards with everything soldered on (such as most modern Apple hardware), the hand-me-downs of the future are going to be harder to work on than today’s hand-me-downs. I’m just an average software guy whose hardware experience is limited to a graduate-level computer architecture course and building PCs. I can talk about caching and branch prediction, but I’ve never picked up a soldering iron in my life; I’m no Louis Rossmann.
They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up
So yes, enterprise customers doing AI data centre buildouts. They are going all out for them at the expense of their consumer business due to supply constraints.
I don't see this situation changing for many years to come. Would indirectly affect the cost of any electronics that has storage or memory on it. Would be interesting to see how Samsung plays this one out with their limited inventory - they make RAM + SSDs, use it themselves on their phones, laptops, etc. Also supply to consumer and business customers. Interesting times.
This is like developers shifting from building homes targeted at homeowners to building build-to-rent neighborhoods for Blackrock and company xD
Have you ever confused BlackRock with Blackstone? Despite their similar
sounding names, these two financial powerhouses represent distinct approaches
to investment management.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s these pesky pc things that people do bad things like piracy with/s
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.
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.
There's a reason why basically only Intel does inhouse fabrication and even they have had to rely out outsourcing it.
In fact, the largest, most advanced, and best known semiconductor manufacturer is primarily government owned: TSMC.
The only thing that gets in the way of their ability to sustain innovation is administrations hostile to publicly funded research.
Outside of innovative industries, there are plenty of examples of important government ran organizations aren't "disasters". Some of which can only be effectively ran via government. For example, healthcare.
What's been a disaster is relying on privatization and capitalism to solve all problems. That's the system of government we had in the dark ages.
Not only that, there was government-led chip research in Taiwan before TSMC (ITRI). And it was going nowhere. If Morris had stayed in ITRI, Taiwan would probably look like a developing country whose primary value is to host the US military bases today.
It would not exist without the government's direct intervention.
Antitrust laws can/should be applied to, eg., Google for search and web monopolization.
If someone is willing to pay more than you for a limited supply of some resource, that isn't a market monopoly.
Google is about to lay waste to everyone.
Google is using their nation state wealth to once again dominate a new sector. Wealth gained from unfair monopolization of search and web and mobile.
Google changed the notion of the URL bar to search. They control every ingress. Now, if you want to access a name brand registered trademark, it flows through Google search. Brands have to pay extortion money to Google to keep others from sniping their rightful name brand.
Google gets even more money because there's a bidding war.
Google pays to put themselves as middle men in front of nearly every web access.
Google doesn't just have a monopoly on this, it's downright unethical and should be tried in court or have laws written to make this illegal.
I have no love for OpenAI, but how do they even compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars this nets?
> Monopolies never last in the tech industry
Google is an invasive species in the ecosystem. They're killing viable competition by engorging themselves and taxing non-productively.
Capitalism should be hard. It should be live or die regardless of size or scale. Google is barely breaking a sweat.
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).
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.
-Thoughtless, deluded, Homo economicus religion, idiot
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.
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..
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.That means that it is a market where there is an asymmetry of power between vendors and buyers, caused by the fact that the vendors know more than the buyers, i.e. only the vendors know the right price for their products.
Therefore in such a market there are winners and losers among the buyers. Those buyers who buy quantities great enough to have negotiating power and who have knowledge about the right prices can buy at those prices, while the other buyers are fooled by the vendors into paying excessive prices.
The fact that the big-volume buyers deserve discounts has nothing to do with price negotiation. In a good market, where there is enough competition, the volume discounts can be public and available for anyone.
Also, a public auction for a product where the demand exceeds the offer has nothing to do with a secret price negotiation.
Any vendor who promotes price negotiation is a vendor who desires to steal money from its customers, instead of performing a mutually advantageous exchange.
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.
https://www.klevv.com/ken/main
And don't forget about https://www.nanya.com/en/
While I never had a problem with 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/
We live in interesting times!
(Cackling madly...)
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?
I really wouldn't want to buy any NAND vendor until a bunch of years after they build a reputation. It's too scary to get a decent bargain SSD drive that actually oh secretly dies really early, doesn't actually have anywhere near the endurance it claims.
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.
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.