You're about to see Crucial-branded drives, memory, and other hardware disappear from store shelves. Micron, the company behind Crucial, is leaving the consumer hardware market entirely.
Crucial has been a big name in PC hardware and accessories for decades, primarily on internal and external solid state drives, RAM sticks, flash drives, and SD cards. It has maintained a solid reputation for quality and endurance -- this year alone, we reviewed the Crucial T720 NVMe SSD and X10 Portable SSD and came away impressed. However, Micron is now exiting the consumer business and shifting its focus entirely to data centers and other enterprise customers.
Micron said in a 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."
The ongoing generative AI boom is powered by large datacenters, which are needed for training and running AI models, and those datacenters need flash memory. The increased demand and limited supply is causing prices to skyrocket for RAM modules, among other components, which in turn increases prices for everything from gaming PCs to Raspberry Pi boards.
Rather than slowly scaling up production to meet that demand, Micron has now chosen the easier option of shifting all its production capacity to enterprise customers. The company called it a "commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage."
The generative AI industry is already a small group of companies shifting the same large piles of money around, focusing on building up far more capacity for generative AI processing than might ever be realistically used. Large companies like Micron leaping head-first into the AI industry bubble is, to say the least, concerning.
Crucial devices were a welcome competitor against SanDisk, Samsung, and other flash memory manufacturers, and less competition usually means higher prices. There's also a more direct human impact here -- Micron employs roughly 53,000 people, and some amount of those individuals will be out of a job. The company will attempt "redeployment opportunities into existing open positions," but that's not saying much.
Crucial product shipments will continue until the end of February 2026, so that's when you can expect to see Crucial hardware disappearing from retail stores. Micron will still provide warranty service and support for all Crucial products.
Source: Micron via Wario64