Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

The lure of AI spending was too much for Micron to ignore. On Wednesday, the US chipmaker announced it's abandoning its Crucial memory and storage lineup to bolster its supply of enterprise-focused chips, including those used in AI systems. "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," Sumit Sadana, EVP and chief business officer at Micron, said in a canned statement. Micron will continue shipping Crucial products through the end of February 2026 and will continue to provide warranty service and support for the products after that date. While the Crucial brand may be on death's door, there's still a chance your next laptop, prebuilt desktop, or workstation could end up having Micron-made memory on board. The chipmaker says it will continue to supply enterprise memory products to commercial channel customers going forward. "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," Sadana said in a statement to his customers who will soon have even fewer choices for memory amid a global shortage of DRAM and NAND. Amazon primed to fuse Nvidia's NVLink into 4th-gen Trainium accelerators Nvidia plows $2B into Synopsys to make GPUs a must-have for design, simulation customers Cheaper 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5 lands as memory costs go through the roof Memory boom-bust cycle booms again as Samsung reportedly jacks memory prices 60% Over the past few weeks, DRAM and NAND memory prices have skyrocketed in the face of unrelenting AI server demand. The market watchers at TrendForce place the blame on DRAM makers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, which it says are allocating advanced process capacity to high-end server DRAM and HBM, leaving only the spare bits for customer chips. And it's not hard to see why. Consumer platforms at most might have 256 GB of DDR5, with most falling well below that. By comparison, GPU servers like Nvidia's HGX B300 can have more than 4 TB of memory between the CPU's DDR5 and GPU's HBM. Counterpoint Research now expects DRAM prices could soon double as chipmakers continue to prioritize the AI market, leaving a shortfall in their wake. It's not just DRAM either. AI is also being blamed for a shortage of NAND flash modules used in solid state media. In November, TrendForce reported that average prices jumped by 20 to more than 60 percent across the various product categories with additional price hikes predicted for this month. ®