Micron has announced in a press release dated December 3 2025 that it will stop selling Crucial branded memory and Solid State Drives (SSDs) for consumer desktops and laptops at the end of February 2026.
The reason according to 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.”
This is unfortunate, given that pricing of memory has surged in 2025 due to the demand of Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers. According to Ars Technica :
“The fault lies squarely at the feet of AI mania in the tech industry. The construction of new AI infrastructure has created unprecedented demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the specialized DRAM used in AI accelerators from Nvidia and AMD. Memory manufacturers have been reallocating production capacity away from consumer products toward these more profitable enterprise components, and Micron has presold its entire HBM output through 2026.”
“At the moment, the structural imbalance between AI demand and consumer supply shows no signs of easing. OpenAI’s Stargate project has reportedly signed agreements for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month, which could account for nearly 40 percent of global production.”
According to CamelCamelCamel, a price tracking website, a pair of Crucial 32GB DDR5 RAM Kit (2x16GB), 5600MHz (or 5200MHz) Desktop Memory on Amazon.com rose
from $73.50 US in April 2025 to $277.98 US on December 3 2025.
Deep Sigh. Lot of memories (no pun intended) using Crucial memory and SSDs over the years.
As Crucial’s history page notes , Crucial began selling memory directly to consumers in 1996 and started selling SSDs in 2008 and its website over time offered a extensive memory selector to guide consumers on whether its memory modules was compatible with your desktop or laptop.