As RAM prices explode and availability becomes an issue thanks to AI companies, Micron announced their Crucial consumer business is no longer a thing.
Sent out in a press release today Micron said they’ve decided to “exit the Crucial consumer business, including the sale of Crucial consumer-branded products at key retailers, e-tailers and distributors worldwide”. Shipments will continue until the end of February 2026 - but after that, it’s over as they will “continue to support the sale of Micron-branded enterprise products to commercial channel customers globally”.
As for why? You probably guessed it - AI! From the press release:
“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. “Thanks to a passionate community of consumers, the Crucial brand has become synonymous with technical leadership, quality and reliability of leading-edge memory and storage products. We would like to thank our millions of customers, hundreds of partners and all of the Micron team members who have supported the Crucial journey for the last 29 years.”
Crucial did RAM and SSDs, so all of it will be going away from us lowly consumers.
Lets see how far it goes if AI starts failing…or even if another company can produce faster than they can.
micron wasn’t just a designer and builder of these products… they also have their own fabs. there are only a few companies that actually produce the RAM and NAND chips used in these products. micron was one of them. the other 2 big ones are skhynix and samsung…
someone please correct me if i’m wrong, but this seems like a massive manufacturing gap that needs to be filled. it’s not easy to just find a new supply of chips.
Its not the first that this has come up, either. IIRC a tsunami massively impacted DDR4 production, i remember the 2x16GB kit that i bought months before had gone up to $500+ USD.