Micron made a pretty surprising announcement today – its consumer RAM brand Crucial will be sold, which means those familiar SSDs and RAM kits you’d normally see on store shelves and major e-tailers will eventually disappear.
Although not effective immediately, the brand that used to own the 3D XPoint technology (also given up 3 years ago by the way) says that it will keep shipping Crucial products through the end of fiscal Q2 2026, with warranties and tech support still being provided at the mean time.
Of course, all of this is to shift all production and strategy focus towards the enterprise side, largely due to the explosion of AI-driven data center demand soaking up nearly every production capacity of fabs across the world. With how much money is on the table for each data center “tender”, Micron sees it as a need to reallocate supply and focus on the segments that are scaling the fastest.
Micron says it’s trying to minimize the impact on its employees by offering redeployment into open roles, which suggests the company isn’t shrinking so much as reshaping itself to chase what it sees as long-term, profitable growth.
This is just one of the brands whose doubling down on the AI boom, and while it might cause a lower supply in the foreseeable future that leads to price hikes on consumer SSDs and DRAM, this can also be an opportunity for other leading brands to fill in the void, such as Kingston and other competitive names.
On the other hand, this is also a sort of a challenge for those who want to expand their consumer portfolio, since the higher base cost of DRAM chips and NAND flash would also lead to the inability to offer products at a sweet deal acceptable to the mass public. Therefore, it’s up to them to navigate through this storm.
