The RAM crisis is just getting started: Micron makes the 'difficult decision' to abandon the consumer memory business to focus on supplying AI data centers
Micron's Crucial brand will no longer offer DDR for PC users starting in February 2026.
(Image credit: Future)
Citing a "surge in demand for memory and storage" driven by AI data centers, Micron announced on Wednesday that it's made the "difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve suply and support for [its] larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments."
In other words: sorry, PC gamers, but you're no longer worth selling RAM to. The server farm next door has way more cash to burn.
Just yesterday we were reporting that high memory prices may well continue into 2028, as Samsung and SK Hynix, who produce roughly 70% of the DRAM currently on the market, are focusing on supplying the enterprise business without dramatically increasing their production capacity. In that same story we reported that Micron, the other big player in memory, is planning to ramp up production that won't be online until late 2028.
But now it sounds like those new assembly lines won't be sending any RAM our way even when they're online.
You may know the Crucial brand name better than Micron, despite the tech company being established in the United States way back in 1978. Crucial is Micron's consumer-focused brand and has been used on RAM, SSDs, even SD cards for years and years. A quick look at the Crucial website reveals just how much RAM it still sells to everyday computer users. That will end in February 2026, Micron said today.
"This decision reflects Micron's commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage," the company said in a press release. "By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders."
Presumably this means Micron will also cease selling Crucial-branded NVMe and SATA SSDs, which have so far not been as affected as RAM by the increase in memory prices but are certainly also on the rise.
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How bad will this be for the ongoing memory supply crisis? Well, that's about 25% of the world's DRAM production capacity now fully devoted to enterprise, and Crucial also makes our favorite budget SSD. So I would say: Not good for us!
Good for Micron's shareholders, though. The stock has gained 180% in value this year on the strength of its HBM (high bandwidth memory) business used to supply GPUs and other tech in high demand due to, you guessed it, AI.
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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