In keeping with the spirit of times, Micron on Wednesday announced plans to wind down its Crucial consumer business worldwide by the end of February 2026. The company is reallocating its output and investments to enterprise-grade DRAM and SSD products amid growing demand from the AI sector.
Micron will continue shipping Crucial-badged consumer products through retailers, online stores, and distributors until the end of its fiscal second quarter, which concludes in late February 2026. After that point, Micron will no longer supply the consumer channel with products under the Crucial name, but will continue to ship its Micron-branded enterprise portfolio, which will remain available through commercial and server-focused partners.
After Micron ceases to ship its Crucial devices, it will continue honoring warranty obligations and technical support for existing Crucial products. Customers who already own Crucial-branded memory modules, SSDs, and other products will continue to receive service coverage well after shipments stop, so the decision will not leave installed hardware unsupported.
As expected, Micron is abandoning its consumer business due to reallocation of its 3D NAND and DRAM output and production capacity to enterprise-grade SSDs, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI accelerators, and server-grade memory modules.
"The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage," said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. "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."
Micron established its Crucial brand some 29 years ago, in 1996, when the enthusiast-grade hardware market began its rapid growth. Over time, Crucial got particularly successful in retail, where its name became synonymous "with technical leadership, quality and reliability," as Micron puts it. However, the current market situation is by far not favorable for these types of products, so instead of shrinking its Crucial portfolio, the company decided to wind it down entirely, albeit without selling off the Crucial brand (at least for now).
There are several reasons behind Micron's decision.
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Firstly, client memory modules and SSDs sit at the lowest-margin end of Micron's portfolio as they compete in highly volatile, price-competitive, and promotion-driven market. Even though the Crucial and Ballistix brands still matter, they are squeezed between high-end enthusiast brands and low-end consumer brands, which makes their evolution difficult. By contrast, data center and enterprise products lock in long-term contracts, higher ASPs, and more predictable demand.
Secondly, the supply environment has changed permanently. AI infrastructure requires every single wafer with memory it can consume, something that has never happened with any industry megatrend previously. This means that every wafer Micron assigns to consumer parts is a wafer not going to a hyperscaler or enterprise contract. As a result, keeping a consumer line would directly limit Micron's ability to fulfill orders from its largest customers, which is a risk for profits and strategic relationships.
Thirdly, even a small consumer business would still require a minimum viable supply chain, including product development, firmware validation, compliance testing, sales teams, retail relationships, and global warranty operations. Such fixed costs barely shrink when volume shrinks, so a reduced consumer business would still burn resources while losing the economies of scale that make the segment viable.
As a result, it strategically makes far more sense to wind down consumer operations entirely and free production capacity, R&D, and product engineering resources for premium products like HBM4/HBM4E/C-HBM4E, enterprise drives, and high-density server memory modules.
Micron indicated it will try to reduce the impact of the decision on employees through internal reassignments into existing vacancies elsewhere in the company.
Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
The writing was on the wall for the DRAM side when they axed their Ballistix brand when DDR5 launched. That seemed like they were giving up on competing which was reinforced by the distinct lack of performance memory kits until very recently. The SSD side surprises me a bit more, but at the end of the day they'll be able to sell any NAND they have available for consumer level products whether they're making the SSDs or not.
Even if it won't likely have an effect on overall business viability it smacks of short term wall street thinking. I think there's definitely value in having their own consumer brand especially when it has a good reputation.
Even if it won't likely have an effect on overall business viability it smacks of short term wall street thinking. I think there's definitely value in having their own consumer brand especially when it has a good reputation.
Crucial has a very good reputation here in the UK . I've been using their products for at least 15 years and, have never suffered a failure. Very disappointed.
no more LPCAMM2 for the upgraders crowd. Samsung seems to have a couple of SKUs, but they're all in Sample status. Hynix has nothing on the market it seems.
