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davrosthedalekyesterday at 12:36 PM2 repliesview on HN

Both Western Digital and Kioxia have reported their 2026 Flash/Hard drive production capacity is sold out.

Micron killed Crucial to focus on AI.


Replies

DiabloD3yesterday at 2:18 PM

I'm glad Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) have been able to do that. However, I also know they've been having problems meeting demand for quite some time, and haven't been able to scale up nearly as fast as the big three have. There was an incident in 2019 and another in 2022 that killed entire runs of chips and screwed them during the Covid datacenter rush.

Micron killed Crucial because Crucial was a weird offering that competed with their own partners. This was always a weird problem, and it just didn't make financial sense to continue with it. One of the analyses I read was Crucial was less than 12% of sales.

Like, don't get me wrong, I've liked many Crucial products over the years, and even recommended some of them, but it was always weird they were trying to out-compete companies like Adata and other major ODMs.

The counterexample of this is Nvidia absolutely trying to kill their partners, and going to first party assembly and sales of products. Nvidia isn't even going to PNY anymore for ODM needs, but going directly to Foxconn.

Micron execs claiming its because of AI is a bit weird and revisionist, because they've been working on exiting the Crucial brand since long before they publicly announced it. The public didn't learn of any such plans until right before the Ballistix brand sunsetting was announced in 2021, but started years before that. Like, I know they're just playing to their shareholders, but its still a bit weird.

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BobbyJoyesterday at 1:41 PM

Samsung and SK Hynix have moved all of their capacity over as well IIRC.