Micron, one of the biggest memory chip makers in the world, has said it will no longer sell chips to people. The company will no longer sell Crucial-branded memory and storage products to people who build or upgrade their own computers.
This choice ends the Crucial brand’s nearly 30-year run as a trusted name for SSDs and RAM. Micron is moving because there is a lot of demand from the AI sector, which is taking important supplies off store shelves and putting them into big data centers.
Micron’s smart move from consumers to AI
It’s clear that Micron is going after bigger, more profitable deals. The company said it is getting out of the consumer business so it can better serve its “larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.”
In real life, this means that the chips it makes are worth more when they are sold to a hyperscale data center builder like Google or Microsoft than when they are sold to someone who wants to buy a RAM kit. You can’t ignore the big profit margins and long-term contracts in the AI and business markets.
It won’t all happen at once. Micron will keep sending out its Crucial consumer products until the end of its second fiscal quarter, which ends in late February 2026. The Crucial brand will no longer be around after that. The company has promised to keep all of its warranty and technical support promises for products that are already out there, so current owners are safe.
Micron’s change makes the memory shortage for consumer electronics even worse than it already was. Analysts say that Micron is the third biggest supplier of DRAM in the world, and its exit leaves a big hole in the market.
In the future, PC builders will have fewer choices and pay more because companies like Samsung and SK Hynix are also working on high-profit AI memory. According to Ars Technica, the price of a standard 32GB DDR5 RAM kit has gone up from about $82 to $310 in the last few months.
In the end, Micron’s choice to leave the consumer memory business is more than just a name change; it’s a sign that the tech industry is going through a big change. AI infrastructure requires extensive resources, leading to alterations in supply chains, thereby diminishing the significance of producing goods for individual consumers. Millions of PC fans will soon be able to look back on the Crucial brand as a part of computing history.
