Micron Kills Its Consumer Business Altogether To Dedicate Everything For AI

Micron, one of the “Big Three” in the memory chip industry, has just announced that it’ll exit the consumer business completely to “improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments.” In other words, AI companies are gobbling up so much memory supply that Micron is willing to kill its three-decades-long consumer business for it.

Crucial Is Dead, Micron Puts All Eggs On AI

So what happens next? For one, Micron’s consumer sub-brand Crucial (along with its RAM and storage products) is officially killed, though consumer shipments will continue until the end of February 2026, and warranties will continue to be honored after that. You may still see Micron-made DRAM modules appearing in third-party RAM modules, like Kingston, for example.

Truth be told, datacenters have way more money to burn than consumers do: any company remotely attached to the AI industry right now have seen skyrocketing stock prices with billions of dollars ready to spend on God-knows-how-many AI datacenters around the world, as evident when looking at the biggest winner of the AI gold rush, NVIDIA. We already know the GPU maker reportedly has stopped supplying memory bundles to AIB makers as a result of memory shortage, so Micron’s measures, while looking drastic, perhaps isn’t too surprising.

Gamers looking to build new PCs or buying any pre-built system will be in for a long winter, as the pricing surge induced by this shortage is going to continue well into 2028, per Hankyung. Reason being, the other two of the Big Three – i.e. Samsung and SK Hynix, both responsible for a combined 70% of global DRAM supply – remained cautious on plans significantly increase production capacities to not risk oversupply, which actually happened post-Covid that caused major price drops to memory products at the time (and that hurts finances, which no company ever wants).

Pokdepinion: I fear this may be the worst period to come for PC gaming, perhaps even for the entirety of consumer tech industry. Only the burst of so-called “AI bubble” is going to reverse this.