Micron retires Crucial products from consumer business

On December 3, 2025 Micron Technology announced that Crucial will exit from the consumer business to focus in the AI business.^[1]

Micron no longer does Crucial product shipments, this since February 2026. Micron will "provide continued warranty service and support for Crucial products" and "continue to support the sale of Micron-branded enterprise products to commercial channel customers globally" ^[2]

The high interest towards artificial intelligence and their lucrative capacity has caused many tech companies to invest on it to increase their revenue. ^{[citation needed]} Micron decided to partner with the AI companies, such as OpenAI, to supply AI datacenters with dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), as they require great amounts of memory to work properly.

For the consumer market, there are only 3 major companies that make DRAM known as "The Big Three": Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.^[3]

Micron announced they quit from consumer business with a justification to supply the AI industry^[2]:

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

All Crucial components (DRAM, SSDs)

The retirement of Crucial products have been affected the overall price of RAMs and other computer components, such as solid-state disks (SSDs).

This also has caused Micron's competitors, Samsung and SK Hynix to increase their component prices as there's less competition, slowed consumer production and less available units for regular consumers. ^{[citation needed]}

In January 2026, WCCFetch released an interview with Christopher Moore, Micron's VP of Marketing, Mobile and Client Business Unit.^[4] When asked whether memory suppliers are inclined towards catering to the AI sectors and leaving consumers behind. Moore replied using dark patterns in an attempt to convince users that they're "helping consumers around the world":

Well, first I would want to try to help everybody understand that the perception may not be exactly correct, at least from our point of view. So I would never want to tell someone what to think or that they're wrong, but our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We're just doing it through different channels. We still have a very sizable business in the client and mobile markets. We are also, of course, servicing our data center customers. And what's going on right now is that the TAM and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.

Micron's decision to supply AI businesses and Moore's response caused outrage by consumers. ^{[citation needed]}

With the shortage produced by the partnership of RAM manufacturers to supply AI datacenters, several consumers have gone to view different alternatives that include acquiring Chinese RAMs^[3] or looking for older memories such as DDR4 or even DDR3.