A person walks past the sign at Micron Technology’s headquarters on June 25, 2025 in San Jose, California.
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micron announced Wednesday that it will stop selling memory to consumers as it focuses on meeting demand for high-performance artificial intelligence chips.
“AI-driven growth in data centers is driving demand for memory and storage soaring,” Sumit Sadhana, Micron’s head of business, said in a statement. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial Consumer business to better serve and support our large and strategic customers in a rapidly growing segment.”
Micron’s announcement is the latest sign that the AI infrastructure boom is causing a shortage of inputs such as memory, as a handful of companies pledge to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years to build massive data centers. The memory that computers use to store data for short periods of time is facing a worldwide shortage.
Micron shares have risen about 175% since the beginning of the year, but fell 3% on Wednesday to $232.25.
AI chips (GPU etc.) Nvidia and advanced micro deviceuses a large amount of state-of-the-art memory. For example, the current generation Nvidia GB200 chip has 192 GB of memory for each graphics processor. Google The latest AI chip, the Ironwood TPU, requires 192 GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Memory is also used in phones and computers, but at lower specs and in much smaller amounts, with many laptops only having 16 GB of memory. Micron’s Crucial brand sold memory on sticks that modders could use to build their own PCs or upgrade laptops. Crucial also sold solid state hard drives.
Micron competes with SK Hynix and Samsung in the high-bandwidth memory market, but is the only U.S.-based memory supplier. Analysts say SK Hynix is Nvidia’s main memory supplier.
Micron, which supplies AMD, says its AI chips use more memory than other companies, giving it a performance advantage in running AI. AMD’s current AI chip, the MI350, has 288GB of high-bandwidth memory.
Micron’s Crucial business was not included in corporate earnings. However, the company’s cloud memory business unit posted 213% year-over-year growth in the most recent quarter.
Goldman analysts on Tuesday raised their price target on Micron stock to $205 from $180, but maintained an unchanged recommendation. Analysts said in a note to clients that with memorable “price momentum continuing,” Micron “expects a healthy upside to street expectations” when it reports quarterly results in two weeks.
A Micron spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the move would result in job cuts.
“Micron intends to reduce the impact of this management decision on team members through reassignment opportunities to existing open positions within the company,” the company said in a release.
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