After high-capacity hard drives and subsequently SSDs and RAM of all kinds had risen sharply in price due to extreme demand from AI companies, this unexpected news came at the beginning of December:
SSDs und DRAM: Crucial ist am Ende
Anyone who has been involved in the hardware sector for some time knows that Micron and Crucial, in particular with their extremely popular (but unfortunately long since discontinued) MX500 SATA SSD, were a real force to be reckoned with and often the only real alternative to Samsung. It is a real shame that the consumer brand “Crucial” is now leaving the stage. Competition stimulates business, and now there is one less supplier.
This will only fuel the rapid rise in prices even more. On December 14, 2025, there was another piece of news that has since been denied, but which I find even more worrying:
Samsung stoppt Produktion von SATA-SSDs: Leaker warnt vor bis zu 18 Monaten Preisdruck bei SSDs
Samsung has stated that these rumors are false. We will see whether this is true or whether Samsung is just trying to control the narrative in the first half of 2026 at the earliest. Since Samsung has always been my number one choice in the SATA sector, it would be tragic if production were to end. There are also no usable NVMe to SATA adapters that could be used to “re-adapt” the problem.
To make another component that has been totally overpriced for a long time even more unaffordable, the following happened the day before yesterday:
GeForce-Grafikkarten: Nvidia will GPU-Produktion angeblich massiv senken
If this proves to be true, the demand for high-performance DRAM will also be the reason here. The “super” refresh models that were actually expected are also not going to be released. These are all unconfirmed rumors, of course.
Future prospects
There are basically two possibilities:
Either all AI companies prove to be highly profitable, as many investors hope, and prices remain extremely high or even worsen. Then the era of forced subscription-based cloud PCs, which many have been predicting for some time, will draw ever closer—running your own powerful hardware will simply be too expensive.
Or much of what is currently being hyped will prove to be an unprofitable business. This would result in falling prices and a richly filled second-hand market – which would be desirable.
It is very difficult to predict how all this will develop, especially since the global economic situation has been anything but stable for some time now.