As RAM prices explode and availability becomes an issue thanks to AI companies, Micron announced their Crucial consumer business is no longer a thing.
Sent out in a press release today Micron said they’ve decided to “exit the Crucial consumer business, including the sale of Crucial consumer-branded products at key retailers, e-tailers and distributors worldwide”. Shipments will continue until the end of February 2026 - but after that, it’s over as they will “continue to support the sale of Micron-branded enterprise products to commercial channel customers globally”.
As for why? You probably guessed it - AI! From the press release:
“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,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. “Thanks to a passionate community of consumers, the Crucial brand has become synonymous with technical leadership, quality and reliability of leading-edge memory and storage products. 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.”
Crucial did RAM and SSDs, so all of it will be going away from us lowly consumers.
It’s not as bad as you think at the moment. Yes, what Micron did was stupid, but I digress from that, focusing on the bigger picture. There are other manufacturers of RAM, so we’re in good hands for now. It could change for the positive or negative in the future, however.
Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung as far as I know. The last two signed deals with OpenAI, now Micron decided to ditch Crucial. How are we in good hands?
I’d never use Samsung RAM, though Hynix I’ve never heard of.
You probably wouldn’t know you were using them. They make the little black squares on the ram sticks, not the ram sticks themselves.
Isn’t there only like, 2 other manufacturers of RAM?
There’s more as far as I’m aware. G-Skill, Patriot, Corsair, and others alike are still selling RAM I think.
In terms of who manufactures chips for RAM, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron have a combined market share of 94%. I don’t know how big of a slice of the pie that Micron is, but it seems we’re down to two (and those two are also investing in AI — for as long as people are buying, anyway)
They make the sticks, not the chips on them. There’s only like 3 ram chip fabs.