Micron defends Crucial wind-down, says meaningful DRAM supply gains won’t arrive until 2028
Micron is pushing back on the backlash over shutting down Crucial. The company says the move does not mean Micron is leaving consumers behind.
In a Wccftech interview, Micron VP Christopher Moore argued that the “consumers are being abandoned” narrative is wrong from Micron’s perspective. Moore said Micron is still helping consumers, just through different channels, mainly by supplying memory to OEMs that build laptops and other systems.
Well, first I would want to try to help everybody understand that the perception may not be exactly correct, at least from our point of view. So I would never want to tell someone what to think or that they’re wrong, but our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. We still have a very sizable business in the client and mobile markets. We are also, of course, servicing our data center customers.
— Christopher Moore, Micron’s VP of Marketing, Mobile and Client Business Unit
After reading comments under the article and on Reddit, that explanation is landing badly with PC enthusiasts. Micron is basically saying consumer demand will be handled through OEMs, while the Crucial retail channel goes away. For anyone buying RAM or SSDs off the shelf, it sounds like “we’re helping consumers” while pulling out of the consumer shelf space.
Micron also warned that extra capacity will not help soon. Moore said the shortage is industry-wide, with AI taking a bigger share of DRAM output. He also said switching between many memory configurations hurts throughput, so Micron is pushing customers to standardize configs to keep factories running at higher output.
Micron has already admitted it cannot fully meet demand today. That means any early gains from new fabs may go toward filling backlogs first, before PC builders see real relief at retail.
Source: Wccftech