Micron ‘s decision to extinguish its consumer brand Crucial is more than just a corporate restructuring. It’s a clear indication of how the explosive growth of artificial intelligence is forcing a brutal prioritisation in IT supply chains. While the move may seem controversial from the perspective of PC enthusiasts, in the wider business picture it is a pragmatic retreat in the face of ongoing shortages and rising RAM prices.
In an interview with Wccftech, Christopher Moore, vice-president of Micron, sheds new light on this strategy. The company has made no secret of the fact that demand from AI data centres is growing at a rate that the current supply cannot meet as standard. The abandonment of retail sales under the Crucial banner is aimed at drastically optimising factory efficiency. Indeed, the key problem turns out to be the diversity of the product range (SKUs). Each time the production line is switched – from 16GB to 12GB modules, for example – costly downtime is involved. In the current market reality, Micron prefers to produce fewer variants, but in a continuous and stable manner, which will directly translate into a poorer range of configurations in PCs in 2026.
Micron assures that it is not abandoning the PC market completely, continuing to work directly with OEM giants such as Dell and Asus. However, individual consumers must prepare for a new reality where component availability is dictated by server room needs.
Prospects for a rapid improvement in the situation are limited. Building new capacity is a multi-year process. Moore points out that although the new ID1 plant in Idaho is expected to start up in mid-2027 – ahead of the original plans – the real impact on the market, once qualification processes are taken into account, will not be felt until 2028. The capacity of further planned plants is a song of the future reaching 2030.
The lessons for the B2B market are clear: until the AI boom slows down or new factories become fully operational, high prices and limited memory availability will remain the norm. Micron, by sacrificing the Crucial brand, has chosen stability of supply for its most lucrative sector at the expense of flexibility in the consumer market.
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