Hacker News Reader

Comment by khhu2bnn | Hacker News Reader

> Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things.

Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.

View on HN

Micron isn't exiting the consumer business. Their consumer brand (Crucial) is going away.

You don't buy SK Hynix or Samsung RAM (unless you are an OEM typically.)

Consumers can still buy RAM from companies like G.Skill, TeamGroup, Corsair, Kingston, etc. Those companies can use chips from any of the big three.

That's not how it works.

Crucial winding down doesn't mean that there's less flash fabs in the world, just like there are plenty of DRAM companies that sell to the consumer market that don't have their own flash fabs (Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc). Those consumer oriented brands bought flash from Micron (not crucial), SK (also doesn't have a consumer facing DRAM brand), and Samsung. That's just as true today as it will be post Feb 2026 when Crucial closes it's doors because Micron selling components to say, Corsair, is an Enterprise transaction from Micron's perspective (B2B), even if the ultimate end product is a consumer oriented one.

I am not sure if I understood your comment correctly but from my stand point Sk Hynix definitely has a consumer facing brand : https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#xcx=0&m=444

Technically you're right, they do. They don't really serve the US Consumer market (anymore) though. There's no (or comparatively very few) established sales channels with consumer retail vendors by SKHynix themselves in the USDM. It's all reseller stuff, often plucked from OEM devices (prebuilts, workstations, etc).

What you linked is OEM RAM. The enterprise market still uses lots of UDIMM's, even though it certainly favors RDIMMs. Yes, it's DDR UDIMM's that are compatible with consumer PC's. But it's not sold like Samsung or Crucial consumer-oriented memory is, at least in the US market. Check the availability of it compared to say Crucial or Samsung. It's virtually non-existant. Check the comments on that very site as well, note how many people are talking about getting them from pre-builts (aka OEM/SI). Note, SK selling UDIMMs to SI/OEM's for consumer products is not a "consumer transaction" to SK, that's a B2B enterprise sale to another company from SK's perspective.

So technically yes, but practically no, not in the US they don't. Elsewhere I'm unsure, but SK has been deprioritizing consumer DRAM sales for a while now, just like Micron.

Micron cuts off the business because there is a much more profitable place to deploy their capacity. The real reason Micron has a resource crunch that forces them to exit a steady business is that enterprise now places a huge premium on things didn't use to be that important.

This massive tide floats all boats and there will be smaller players filling the gap. With slightly worse chips at first yes, but historically DRAM had been a cyclical businesss where new manufacturing capabilities were brought online en masse after a boom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com