Micron defends Crucial wind-down, says meaningful DRAM supply gains won’t arrive until 2028.
Micron says it is helping consumers by pulling out of retail business
Direct quote from Micron’s VP of Marketing, Mobile and Client Business Unit, Christopher Moore
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.
And what’s going on right now is that the TAM and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.
Meanwhile my reaction
What’s happening now is that all these data center build outs are going on, and the TAM of the enterprise or data center business is growing what used to be 30, 35%, and then to 40%, and now to 50% and 60% of the overall market is requiring more bits than what used to happen. And the entire industry is short. So I think that’s something for people to understand.
This is not a Micron issue, it’s an industry issue, where us and our peers or our competitors are all rushing to service these segments as much as we can, and there’s just not enough supply to go around. It’s a really unfortunate situation. But I think it’s really important for people to understand we are still servicing the consumer market.
Furthermore according to him Micron’s fab expansion is not expected to generate material impact until 2028. The timeline is extended by lengthy buildout and certification phases, further complicated by the stringent technology and yield perfection required by AI customers.
Direct quote
In order to dramatically increase the number of bits we need more clean room space. And that takes a lot of time. So we broke ground in Idaho in our ID1 facility three years ago. And that’s gonna come online in mid-2027.
We pulled that, it was end of 2027. We pulled it into mid-2027. But you’re not really gonna see real output, meaningful output by the time we get all the qualification done and customers are accepting it and you get the tools, everything up and running until 2028.
Memory manufacturers are scrambling in to build newer production lines, yet constraints of the process eventually forces them to push the timelines ahead by several quarters, which means that for the average consumer, the DRAM shortages could persist for quite some time now, or at least until the AI demand starts to fade away.