AI boom: Crucial disappears from the consumer market

Kevin Hofer

4-12-2025

Translation: machine translated

Pictures: Kevin Hofer

The AI hype is claiming its next victim - and this time it's hitting PC screwdrivers hard. Micron pulls the plug on its consumer brand Crucial. Why cheap SSDs and RAM bars have to die so that chatbots can think faster.

If you've assembled a PC in the last few years, you're guaranteed to be familiar with Crucial. The brand was practically synonymous with solid and affordable SSDs and RAM modules. I have also repeatedly recommended Crucial models in various tests.

However, those days are now over. The parent company Micron no longer wants to sell parts for the consumer market under the brand. The reasoning from the boardroom reads as sober as it is brutal: from now on, the focus is entirely on enterprise and - who would have thought it - artificial intelligence.

More coal as a goal

The production capacities that were previously used for your NVMe SSD or DDR5 RAM are being radically reorganised. The targets of desire are HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and highly specialised enterprise NAND.

The AI hunger for memory is practically insatiable. Large language models such as ChatGPT or Claude not only require immense computing power, but also huge amounts of ultra-fast memory. And this is where significantly higher prices can be achieved than with a 1TB SSD upgrade for the home gaming PC.

Memory is becoming even more of a luxury

What does this mean for normal users? Nothing good. If one of the world's largest memory manufacturers turns its back on the consumer market, supply will become scarcer and prices will rise. And this at a time when storage is already damn expensive. Other manufacturers such as Samsung, Western Digital or Kingston are unlikely to be able to fill the resulting gap. What's more, I fear that their focus will also shift even further away from consumers.

It's a bitter pill to swallow. The era when you could upgrade storage almost as a «throwaway» at ridiculously low prices is over. The AI boom is sucking up all the resources and we consumers will have to take a back seat for better or worse.

Rest in peace, Crucial. After this action by Micron, it will be difficult for me to recommend your products in future - should you ever find your way back to us «little ones». I just don't like the company enough for that now.

Kevin Hofer

Senior Editor

kevin.hofer@digitecgalaxus.ch

From big data to big brother, Cyborgs to Sci-Fi. All aspects of technology and society fascinate me.

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