Micron Technology is exiting its consumer business. The memory-chip company is putting all its bets on artificial-intelligence.
The stock was down 3.6% at $225.73 in morning trading on Thursday.
Micron said Wednesday that it would stop selling Crucial-branded consumer memory products at the end of February 2026. It will continue to honor warranties and provide support for existing product.
The move comes as Micron works to ramp up supply of memory-chip components for AI hardware. In particular, a form of chip called high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is necessary as a component of the latest processors from the likes of Nvidia. Micron is in a race with South Korean rivals SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics to supply HBM chips and other components to AI semiconductor companies.
“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, chief business officer at Micron, in a statement.
That huge surge in AI demand is transforming the memory-chip industry. Samsung temporarily stopped announcing contract prices for some memory-chip products last month as spot prices tripled, according to Taiwanese publication DigiTimes. Research firm TrendForce expects conventional DRAM—dynamic random access memory—prices to rise between 18% and 23% in the fourth quarter.
Analysts at Mizuho on Wednesday raised their target price on Micron to $270 from $265 and kept an Outperform rating on the stock on the back of AI-driven sales, noting its HBM revenue has more than doubled this year.
“We see Micron still well positioned in the AI race and strong AI data center exposure. We see Micron driving continued top line and earnings upside benefiting from positive pricing in HBM/leading-edge DRAM,” wrote Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh.
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