Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

The lure of AI spending was too much for Micron to ignore. On Wednesday, the US chipmaker announced it's abandoning its Crucial memory and storage lineup to bolster its supply of enterprise-focused chips, including those used in AI systems. "The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and …

[David 132]

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!

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Damn.

That was my first thought too.

[Nate Amsden]

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..

[David 132]

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!

[Scotthva5]

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.

[blu3b3rry]

Re: Damn.

+1 for Corsair Vengeance RAM. We've been using 32GB 3200MHz kits in SODIMM form in production kit for effectively as long as DDR4 has been a thing, they very very rarely go wrong. I've also had good luck with it at home.

I hear reasonable things about Patriot branded stuff, not used their RAM but their SATA SSD's are pretty decent and rather cheap. And of course there's always Samsung if you can justify the price or snag them on offer.

[Homer.Simpson]

Re: Damn.

You guys realize that Corsair buys a ton of RAM from Micron, right?

[Hubert Cumberdale]

Re: Damn.

Ditto. Was thinking about doubling it recently and found exactly what you did. Should've held on to my old sticks and sold them at massive profit, too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Damn.

All that will happen will be another commodity swept up by China. We’ll be running YMTC and CXMT memory and GigaDevice SSD’s soon and lamenting US, Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese lost companies.

Like Solar, components and BEV already largely lost.

[Not an Anonymous Coward]

Re: Damn.

It's considerably cheaper per byte than a 4mb SIMM in 1995.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Damn.

I've been using Corsair for years, initially I didn't even realise the modules I'd bought were RGB, I got them because they were on offer. I did have one module out of a set of four fail some years ago, but they did honour their lifetime guarantee and replace the set, I just had to demonstrate that the module failed under memtest86. Other than that, they have been rock solid.

[MJI]

Re: Damn.

I am running 128GB of Corsair RGB RAM for 18 months and it seems fine.

I am in my 60s, but flashy lights were not much more. And lights up under the computer desk nicely.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Damn.

And another one here. I don't buy memory often, but I don't want to have to.

Though my use for the last few decades has been laptops; as more and more memory is coming soldered in, perhaps this is less of a visible problem?

[Spazturtle]

Re: Damn.

You can search by module name on Kingston's site, so find what modules have the best performance (overclocking communities often have a list) and search for that.

[tomeh]

Re: Damn.

Same here, been all Crucial for as long as I can remember. This is a real bummer :(

[Piro]

Re: Damn.

Mushkin? But, I think they use Micron. Oh well.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Damn.

Kinda sad, Micron were making RAM way back in Commodore's heyday and I've had machines with their products in since then. Pretty sure I'll still see their chips in servers but Crucial will be a loss for end user machine upgrades.

Kingston used to be pretty good but I've lost faith in their brand over the past decade and now actively avoid them.

Samsung made stuff is usually pretty good (at least the server stuff is) and I've had good experience with Corsair

[anothercynic]

Re: Damn.

I find it unconscionable that a company like Micron is happy to throw away a brand like Crucial instead of selling it to someone who is thrilled to keep the amazing customer loyalty to the brand alive.

It goes to show how this AI palaver is making everyone do crazy stuff... I hope Micron gets its fingers well and truly burnt and goes pop when the AI bubble does same. If you can't be arsed to keep a trusted consumer brand alive, you don't deserve to return to it when you suddenly find yourself in a deep hole after your chase for untold riches explodes in your face.

As for replacements? Samsung would be my bet. Their SSD and memory products have been rock solid for absolute years - they own the firmware, the controllers, the fabs, everything is in-house. So for RAM, you should be fine (it's just hardware), and for solid-state you should be fine too.

[wolfetone]

Re: Damn.

I think really it's a good move from Micron not to sell the Crucial brand.

The chips on the RAM and the storage that come with that Crucial branding are Micron chips and it's those chips that people are happy with. If Micron sold Crucial, the Crucial RAM etc everyone would use based on loyalty and good memories would be garbage. Because the people who buy these brands are there to make money. Put the shittest thing in the product and let nostalgia sell it.

So while it's crap, I think the fact Crucial remains with Micron is a good thing as at least when the AI bubble bursts they could go back to using it.

[anothercynic]

Re: Damn.

While I agree with you generally, Micron has not said they're withdrawing from the DRAM market... just from the consumer market. So, if they sold Crucial to someone who will buy masses of (D)RAM chips from them and takes over dealing with pesky hoi polloi, Micron would be rid of the consumer stuff but still sell to a 'strategic partner'. Selling Crucial does not necessarily have to mean not using Micron chippery. :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Damn.

As I read it it’s repurposing manufacturing and lower Margin DRAM being sacrificed for HBM. Hence Crucial being retired.

These is nothing to sell on past a brand name.

[SVD_NL]

Re: Damn.

From my experience, memory compatibility isn't as finicky as it used to be (especially compared to 25 years ago). I'd attribute that mainly to memory controllers becoming a lot more resilient and flexible.

I've been using Kingston ram for the past 10-15 years, and it hasn't failed me yet. The only one that was possibly a bit iffy was a set of early hyperx ddr4, but it's more likely my motherboard was bad (it had some issues booting and died after 2 years or so).

Also a lot of memory expansions (hundreds of corporate devices) where the existing memory was different than the Kingston one. Mainly their "regular" lineup (starts with KCP-), occasional hyperx modules.

I also appreciate their clear naming scheme, you can identify the exact type of memory based on part number, so if you care about single vs double rank and those sorts of things, you can check that too.

This is mainly regular use corporate devices and personal workstations, server memory is a whole different beast of course. And i haven't had a lot of experience with their ddr5 stuff yet, but the 10 or so devices with their ddr5 memory haven't had issues yet.

[bigphil9009]

Re: Damn.

Not to be that guy (actually, who am I kidding, I love being that guy), but did AliExpress even exist 25 years ago?

[Steven Kudelko]

Re: Damn.

you're not the only "that guy"... i thought the same thing

[ChrisC]

Re: Damn.

"AliExpress-level", not "AliExpress-supplied" - i.e. I read that as the OP equating the quality of the stuff they were getting back then, with the quality of stuff we might now be more familiar with courtesy of AliExpress, *not* that they were saying they'd actually got it from AliExpress back then.

[ChrisC]

Re: Damn.

Likewise - the Crucial memory selector became my first port of call about that long ago whenever I found myself putting together the bits for a new build PC or to add extra to an existing one, and more recently I'd also been speccing their SATA SSDs as upgrades to older systems where I couldn't justify the additional expense of something like a Samsung Evo, but where even the lower performance offered by a BX or MX was still streets ahead of the spinning rust it was replacing.

But then I thought to myself "when was the last time I actually did any of that?", and I realised that my days of regularly getting my hands dirty (and torn to shreds by randomly placed sharp pieces of metal casing) building new and upgrading old PCs are now mostly behind me - the last few PCs I've introduced into the fleet at home have all been off the shelf laptops, and the last time I did any tweaks to one of the few remaining desktops at home, or been asked to upgrade one owned by a relative, is probably now getting on for 7-8 years ago.

So as sad as this news is, it's more from a nostalgia perspective, and realistically I suspect its effect on me will be negligible to non-existent - yes, if I ever do find myself at some point in the future getting back into system builds/upgrades, then I might lament their no longer being part of the consumer market, but given how infrequently I (and I suspect many in the same sort of position as me) now send any business their way, compared to how much I used to a decade+ ago, it's entirely understandable why Crucial/Micron have taken the decision to withdraw from this sector and focus on the bits which are still money-makers.

[Roland6]

Re: Damn.

Depends on what premium you are prepared to pay. If you don’t feel safe using other third-parties such as SK Hynix , Kensington, Integral, Samsung etc I would suggest going with a major systems builder such as Dell or Lenovo and use their branded memory.

[Irongut]

Re: Damn.

If you want slow as molasses memory sure. Dell, HP, etc buy cheap crap memory that is slow. Much like all the other cheap crap compnents they put together and overcharge for.

[DS999]

Just bought some in May

Was building a new PC (because the old one decided to die) and there was a deal on Amazon, 2x24 GB of Crucial Pro DDR5 for $90! I wonder how many years before that price will be beat? Sounds like it has gone from the $2/GB price I got to more like $10/GB today.

Since I got such a good price on that I decided to max out my middle aged laptop while I was at it. There was a deal on "no name" 2x16 GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs at Amazon for $40, and the equivalent Crucial was 50% higher and shipping was a month out so I took a chance on the brand "Timetec" since Amazon has an easy return policy. Worked great, passed a weekend of memtest86 with flying colors. That's the only RAM I've bought in at least 20 years that wasn't Crucial. Maybe I was just lucky but now that Crucial is no more that's the only brand I have any experience with so I guess I'll consider them first next time lol

[TReko]

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.

[David 132]

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.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Fire sales soon?

The stripped-out memory modules will still have some value when the rest goes to landfill.

[DS999]

Re: Fire sales soon?

They are surface mount HBM stacks, so they won't have value for most people either.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Fire sales soon?

GPUs don't use socketed DIMMs - RAM is almost always soldered down and is typically HBM or GDDR6{X} and not DDR5.

Although, maybe with hundreds of 42U racks worth of HBM chips, it could be worthwhile to desolder all the HBM chips and do something actually useful with them (custom PCBs for ultra-fast HBM SSDs maybe).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Fire sales soon?

Not actually true, those GPUs can still be used.

[williamyf]

Re: Fire sales soon?

Normally, you can use them AI GPUs for all relevant rendering tasks, and pipe the video output through your otherwise idle iGPU

[phuzz]

Re: Fire sales soon?

Those AI accelerator cards are really good at the massively parallel data processing that some scientific projects need*, so hopefully a lot of them go to good homes.

*(because 'AI' is just data processing, and that's what those cards were originally designed for)

[DS999]

Re: Fire sales soon?

Yes they will be repurposed as HPC clusters at fire sale prices. But the customers for that (universities and governments) won't be able to afford the power to run more than a fraction of them, so most will end up at the recycler.

[pablov]

Re: Fire sales soon?

As long as they run CUDA, they'll be great for rendering and similar purposes.

[ChrisC]

Re: Fire sales soon?

Yup. When I bought my current laptop I pushed the boat out a little more than I'd otherwise have done, in order to get a decent discrete GPU setup thinking that, now the kids are older, I might actually have the time to get back into PC gaming. And though I have made some use of the GPU for that, the majority of the work I've pushed through it so far has been running a CUDA-optimised H265 video encoder (because one of the other things I've been able to get back into is video editing...) where its ability to display stuff is of no relevance whatsoever.

So describing these things as GPUs is now quite misleading, because they're no longer fixed-function devices intended solely for accelerating real-time graphics output. Adding one to your system is more akin to adding a FPU to systems of old - it's not going to magically speed up *everything* your system does, but for anything which *can* be offloaded to it rather than being left for the CPU to deal with, the benefits can be striking.

[Snake]

Re: Fire sales soon?

When the AI crash happens, Micron will be up shite's creek without a paddle. Dropping an entire product line to go all-in on the flavor-of-the-month only shows how incredibly short-sighted modern business is, going for the best quarterly reports rather than thinking long term. When the AI purchasing bubble bursts, then what Micron?? You'll be behind the 8-ball in the storage market, having to redevelop and ramp up production just to get back into a game where you'll be behind and trying to play catch-up.

This is yet another stupid, insipid, money-grabbing-today / the-hell-with-tomorrow business decision just showing end stage capitalism.

[Intelligence_404]

Re: Fire sales soon?

5+ years ago the cryptoscam and AI were spiking the GPU prices. It's only a bubble.

5+ years later it's GPUs+RAM.

I bet 5+ years from now it'll be GPUs+RAM+CPU...

[Jim Mitchell]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought my first computer from Micron many years ago

Micron never made any PCs, and there is no relation to Micronics Inc.

[Clay P. Igion]

Re: I bought my first computer from Micron many years ago

I hate to disagree with an AC but Micron did indeed make PCs in the 1990's and early 2000's. They stopped in the early 2000's (2001 maybe?), so it's been a while and youngsters could be forgiven for not knowing their computing history to that level of detail.

Google tells me they spun off their PC manufacturing arm which became "MPC Corporation", which itself is now long gone.

Here's hoping the Micron and Crucial brands don't get dragged through the mud with this latest move.

[PRR]

Re: I bought my first computer from Micron many years ago

> hoping the Micron and Crucial brands don't get dragged through the mud

Even in 2018, when I wanted another 4GB in my 2015 machine, and I'd always had good service from Crucial in the past, it turned out they had farmed the RAM small sales to Digital River, the old decrepit shareware fulfillment house (but hid it behind subdomains). DR sat on the order for a month. I cancelled, and an hour later they shipped. I returned it on sight and told my credit card why. Took a month to get credited. Googled 'Crucial gripes' and same all over the web. With a few other insults, Crucial has slipped in my book from 11 of 10 to 0 of 10. To me, they have already dragged ass in their own mud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I bought my first computer from Micron many years ago

This AC stands corrected then.

[BartyFartsLast]

Well I never knew that...

Seems I also owned a Micron PC back in the day, or at least the majority parts of one.

[IGotOut]

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.

[simonlb]

Re: I really hope...

Yeah, "Thanks for being a loyal customer for the past x years. Also, fuck you!"

[Dan 55]

Re: I really hope...

If it doesn't pop, we can always look forward to a future of scrabbling around in landfill sites under the shadow of huge data centres, searching for lost Z80s and 4116 chips.

[Nastybirdy]

Whoopee.

Great. Now nobody can buy RAM because of AI, and before that nobody could buy graphics cards because of bitcoin mining. Just another internet bubble fucking it up for everyone but the tech bros and billion-dollar companies.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Whoopee.

Bubbles inevitably burst. I get the sense that the "AI" bubble doesn't have long left, given that most of the use cases seem to be pretty illusory when you look at them closely.

Tech companies have invested heavily in the "free sample" model, but are going to have to start charging soon, and people just aren't going to pay to get ChatGPT to summarise emails for them, or for Bing image generator to come up with yet another variation on "Man of Pider".

This isn't to say that it has zero uses, but the cost/benefit analysis doesn't weigh up for most of them. I used Copilot yesterday to generate a simple test harness for an API client I've been working on. It needed quite a lot of finessing just to get it to compile, and even then, the code is a mess, and likely full of inefficiencies and vulnerabilities (ironically, Copilot also pointed several of these out when I put in the PR on GitHub). Given that it's just something internal to assist our QA testing, because the suppliers of the actual API are dogshit to work with, this doesn't matter, but it neatly illustrates the limited usefulness of AI, even in the few cases where it is actually useful. It may have saved me half a day or so in dev time, but does this weigh up against the monthly cost my employer is paying for it? Will it continue to do so when the inevitable price hikes come along.

Meanwhile, I'll put off rebuilding my gaming PC with a new motherboard and RAM until prices come back down to a sensible level, in the firm knowledge that RAM prices have always gone up and down like a rollercoaster. The 5070ti I've got my eye on will no doubt be a few hundred quid cheaper in the new year anyway.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Whoopee.

The number of "is this a bubble" stories seem to be increasing in volume and frequency so, yeah, unless one of them comes up with some incredible innovation soon I think it's going to burst rather spectacularly and likely in the near future.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Whoopee.

We can all enjoy watching it happen in the Metaverse on our 3D TVs, right?

[hgfdhgddghgfh]

Re: Whoopee.

And inbetween nobody could buy storage because of Chia mining.

[Anonymous Coward]

RIP

Never once has a problem with them, always my go to

[Anonymous Coward]

Wont be missed - over priced vs other branded / quality competition int eh retail space.

Have been buying an M.2 SSD this week, Crucial were a good 40% more expensive than other branded versions for the same spec.

/best of luck with your new bubble venture. Anyone remember "Bubble RAM" from years ago ? Now we are seeing Bubble RAM 2.0!

[Lon24]

Ah yes. Was it 20 years ago? Made some money supplying and fitting RAM sticks to offices that had been raided overnight and their RAM expertly removed.

Will we see organised crime targeting minimally staffed AI bitbarns for juicy ram & gpus as prices become even more eye-watering?

[Like a badger]

Will we see organised crime targeting minimally staffed AI bitbarns for juicy ram & gpus as prices become even more eye-watering?

Possibly, but because the packages for DC use are increasingly customised to their needs, it's not like there's that much that can be flogged on fleabay to consumers. So they'll be looking to steal from Western DCs and then sell into those non-Western markets where stolen goods often end up already.

[Strahd Ivarius]

Nice move, raiding an office for memory and then selling it back for a big profit.

[phuzz]

Have been buying an M.2 SSD this week

Well there's your problem! You should have bought it a couple of months ago before prices started to rise.

[Anonymous Coward]

My rrse...

"Micron has made the *difficult* decision to exit the..."

Difficult my rrse!

Money see money do... [SIC]

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the memory...

... of hardware that was yours, when cartels kept their paws

Off all the private data they now sweep into their maws

How lovely it was.

Thanks for the memory

Of software that you owned, whose home was never phoned

When customers weren't carcasses just filleted and boned

How lovely it was.

[Gith]

Just to echo a few other comments regarding an alternative - had no issue with Corsair RAM for the past few years.

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Good thing I'm not planning on building another machine any time soon, because I've used nothing but "Crucial" memory for roughly 20 years...

[Aaronage]

Sad face

I’ve been buying Crucial SSDs since my first SSD almost 15 years ago

Always found them a good balance of value and reliability (never had issues with Micron based drives!)

Sad to see them exit the consumer space

[Colin Critch]

Embedded and desktop micron all the way

This is sad.

I've been using Crucial SSD in most of my kit and it is rock solid. Just bought another 4TB to preempt the rush and higher prices.

On the embedded side I was one of the developers involved in an industrial audio product using a micron SPI NAND flash chip ( about 100MBytes) and these are still going strong 10 years later, playing the same files over and over, Segger's emFile helps :-)

When the AI hype bubble is burst and there is tumbleweed rolling through GPU bit barns maybe some of that SSD and RAM will get to be used for something constructive........

[blockster]

i hope developers notice.

and start optimising for memory usage again for a few rounds. there should be lots of low hanging fruits to be had.

[Roland6]

Re: i hope developers notice.

Let’s hope the likes of MS take note.

Given AI price gouging, the price of conventional memory will increase and be in short supply.

Hence I expect OEMs aiming to hit price points will increasingly supply systems with minimal RAM and if it’s soldered on to save a few pence…

So the question will have to be whether W11+M365 will be able to perform basic office tasks in 4GB of RAM, or whether you can only run the client for Windows 365 Cloud PC, which doesn’t use local AI processing capabilities…

[goblinski]

Been there...Seen that

Micron ditched Lexar in the same way, in 2017.

For the sape capacity, they were charging for RAM three times what they were charging for memory cards, and apparently both were using the same chip (or the same something-something), which was already in short supply.

The Lexar name was bought out, and now exists under a whole different ownership (Longsys).

We'll see the same thing with Crucial. Someone will buy the label and slam it on something else

[theOtherJT]

Less than 24 hours later I got an email...

"WE WANT TO BUY YOUR RAM! Has your business just completed a cloud transition? Do you have DDR4 or DDR5 ECC RAM? Due to market pressure we have HIGH DEMAND for memory and will BUY YOUR RAM!"

This is a real thing that actually happened. As far as I can tell they're legit too. They are a real company that actually exists and actually buys depreciated IT kit to sell on. According to their price list I have several thousand quid of memory in my desk drawers at the moment... I wonder if I can convince the bean-counters to let me offload it.

[Roland6]

Re: Less than 24 hours later I got an email...

Might be worth sitting tight for a few weeks…

Two weeks back CEX were selling 16GB PC25600 DDR4 3200MHz SODIMM for £25, today it’s £40.

Their offer price for “desktop” DDR5 ECC has similarly jumped - they are currently out of stock.

Interestingly, the lower speed modules have hardly changed in price.

I’m glad I make it a habit of removing RAM and HDD/SSDs when scrapping systems, as it looks like there might be a small Christmas bonus…

[b1k3rdude]

Welp, the the LLM bubble bursts and they come crolling back to the consumer, the priced better be cheap.

[Phil995511]

When the speculative bubble around AI collapses, Micron/Crucial will fall with it...

I've owned two 2.5" SSDs from Crucial. The first one failed quickly, and the second, a M550, is incompatible with Linux installations when connected in an external USB enclosure.

In my opinion, this company has never been known for the quality of its products.

[myootnt]

Sad, but does it really matter that much now?

Sitting here in the age of onboard RAM and SSDs, not much is left except custom expansion on SBC devices like Pi. Sure, it means that you have to buy a pre-built workstation or server with the RAM you need. I have no interest in the whinges from gamers. The only thing I ever gained from gamers is consumer mobos with ceramic caps. The rest of the BS the showboat box crowd has brought is 5h1t3.

I've put hundreds of Crucial SSDs and thousands of sticks of RAM in place over the years and had few failures and they were covered by warranty. One of the failures was memorable because I worked with them to figure out what was going on, which was curious and corrected by a firmware update. The issue was a student laptop; we got up to the third SSD failure in the first semester with it. It turns he was taking it out in every class for just a few minutes. I forget the exact internal process, but it was failing to complete due to the short run time and eventually it decided it was a fault and the drive locked itself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Difficult decision my arse. They oozed down that money hole without even a squeak.

[Strahd Ivarius]

To summarize

All memory and ssd will go to AI datacenters, leaving nothing for end-users devices.

So, soon, nobody will have a working personal device able to use the new AI instances.

Won't it end with a crash of the AI bubble? and perhaps faster than expected?

[Michael Hoffmann]

I'll just pile on, and also join the choir:

For RAM it's been Crucial, then Corsair. Not least because they always continue to have equally good non-RGB models. If I wanted a disco in my office, I would have kept my leisure suit.

For SSD it's been Crucial, then Samsung (and for a brief while Intel, they had some good going in the early years). My Crucial T705 is an absolute beast. but you gotta keep it cool.

Been that way for years and years (I've been an early adopter of SSDs, when I remember even some fellow techs thinking I was exaggerating and they were a fad)

[jonathan keith]

It'll bite them in the arse when the AI bubble pops

... which will be sooner rather than later.

When will these people learn that shortsighted profit-chasing is never a sound business strategy? I hope their bonuses are paid in stock that vests after five years.

[Camilla Smythe]

As per Gerard...

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/12/04/ai-screws-us-over-again-memory-shortages-crucial-shutting-down/

The switch will be to silicon which will not come back to the prolls. It will be e-waste when the bubble bursts.

As to selling the brand so someone can still keep pumping them out see above.

None of the manufacturers will be producing stuff that will be going into sticks.

Everything consumer is stuffed along with anything legacy.

Suck it up and buy it while you can.

A long Winter is on the cards.