Crucial will honor RAM and SSD warranty as Micron nixes renowned memory brand to chase AI profits

One of the top three memory makers - Micron - has announced its exit from the consumer business, three decades after establishing the renowned Crucial brand.

The move comes as the two biggest memory companies - Samsung and SK Hynix - are finding out that they can charge Nvidia double for the high-end memory that goes into its graphics cards and AI chipsets, and the market would take it.

The consumer memory business, on the other hand, has been put on the back burner as much less lucrative. The 64GB Crucial Pro memory kit, for instance, may have fallen in price on Amazon a bit, but is still double what it used to cost just a month or so ago.

The insatiable appetite for AI data centers by nearly every Silicon Valley giant is behind said unprecedented surge in memory prices. So much so, that Micron had to officially announce that it will stop making Crucial RAM or SSD products for retail consumers to focus on the AI business and enterprise customers from now on.

"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," reads the statement, referring to the exorbitant profits in the AI data center realm.

The warranty of existing Crucial products will continue to be valid, and Micron will continue selling its RAM and SSDs through the usual retail channels until the end of February. Afterward, the Crucial memory consumer brand will cease to exist.

Recently, some industry insiders claimed that Samsung may have undergone similar tribulations when its MX division in charge of the Galaxy S26 series was denied preferential treatment in terms of mobile memory prices by the DX semiconductor department. A Samsung spokesperson has reached out to us denying the reports with the following:

Recent reports that Samsung's DS division has rejected certain customer requests are baseless and not true. We are in close communication with global customers to address industry needs.

Still, there is plenty of tangential evidence that the consumer memory business is being sacrificed on the altar of AI profits, and Micron's announcement is just another confirmation that this trend, along with high memory prices, might be here to stay.