Non-Crucial: Micron Kills Consumer Brand to Feed the GenAI Grift
Published on 4 December 2025
Micron is officially winding down the Crucial brand to chase the GenAI gold rush. Here is why this pivot is a manufacturing disaster for consumers, forcing us to pay an 'AI Tax' on hardware while the industry doubles down on a bursting bubble.
It is official. Micron is taking the Crucial brand out back and putting it out of its misery. By early 2026, the reliable memory sticks and MX500 SSDs that anchored budget PC builds for over a decade will effectively cease to exist.
They aren't going bust, oh no... It's GenAi time.
Micron has decided the consumer market doesn't offer the obscene margins they crave. Instead, they are aggressively retooling their fabs to go all-in on the "AI revolution." It is a massive gamble that tells gamers and DIY builders to get lost, creating a supply vacuum that guarantees the next few years of PC building will be a miserable, expensive slog.
The "AI Tax" on Your PC:
This is a physical manufacturing crisis. Silicon wafers are a finite resource. Every wafer Micron allocates to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for data centres is one less wafer making DDR5 for your motherboard or NAND for your storage.
HBM is notoriously inefficient to manufacture. It devours roughly three times the wafer capacity of standard memory to produce the same gigabyte count. To feed the gluttonous appetite of the "hyperscalers" like Microsoft and OpenAI, Micron is artificially engineering a shortage of consumer parts. We have already seen a massive spike in RAM and SSD prices. We are essentially paying an "AI Tax" to subsidise a chatbot infrastructure that most of us didn't ask for.
Doubling Down on a Bursting Bubble:
The absurdity is that Micron is betting the farm on a bubble that is already leaking air. The industry loves to claim demand for AI chips is infinite, but the reality on the ground is different.
The panic-buying phase is over, as I've covered in my Meta-Google + custom chips post. However, Micron is so terrified of missing what's left of the gold rush, they are burning their bridges with the consumer market to chase B2B contracts, even as the return on investment for GenAI looks increasingly like a mirage.
A Cartel by Any Other Name:
Let’s not be naive enough to give these companies the benefit of the doubt. The "Big Three" memory makers (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron) operate as a functional cartel with a criminal record to match.
We have been here before. In the early 2000s, executives from these companies literally went to prison for price fixing. In 2018, we saw a suspicious "coincidence" where all three stopped increasing production simultaneously despite high demand. Now, they have the perfect alibi. They don't need secret meetings in hotel rooms to rig the market anymore; they just need to point at "AI supply constraints" and watch the price of DDR5 skyrocket while they count their record profits.
✅ The Verdict
When you dig into why we are beholden to three companies who can simply decide to turn off the tap for consumers, you find the fingerprints of American interventionism all over the crime scene. This entire disaster is the direct, festering result of the US screwing over Japan in the 1980s.
Forty years ago, Japanese giants like NEC and Toshiba were embarrassing Silicon Valley. They built better chips at better prices. But the US, in a fit of insecurity and protectionist paranoia, couldn't handle the competition. They bullied Japan into the 1986 Semiconductor Agreement, effectively nuking the Japanese chip industry to "save" American companies.
It is the classic American playbook: if you can't win on merit, flip the board over.
Well, we've been paying for that ever since. They destroyed a healthy, competitive market and left a vacuum filled by a Korean duopoly and a complacent Intel. The US bet everything on "smart" CPUs and let the "dumb" memory manufacturing drift overseas, creating the fragile, top-heavy supply chain we suffer under today.
Now, we see the same pattern with GenAI. Just as they wrecked the chip market to protect their ego in the 80s, the US tech sector is now wrecking the energy grid and the consumer hardware market to prop up a speculative AI bubble. Micron knows it is the only major US memory fab left, so it can act with total impunity. They can kill Crucial, screw the consumer, and jack up prices, knowing they are "too big to fail" in the eyes of Washington.
As always, the US creates the mess, the corporations take the loot, and the rest of the world (and the environment) picks up the tab.