AI poisons another chalice as Micron ditches consumers for data centers

It feels as if every week, the doom and gloom rears its head in the PC gaming space. As artificial intelligence puts dents in almost every industry adjacent to it, the latest to fall victim is Micron, the RAM and SSD company.

You’ll probably know them better by their consumer brand, Crucial, which has consistently put out some of the best portable drives and reliable RAM in recent years. On top of that, they’re also one of the only companies in the world to produce chips to power RAM, with Samsung and SK Hynix being the other major players.

With Micron stepping away, the ongoing RAM and emerging SSD shortages will only be exacerbated in 2026. If last week was a bad time to build a PC, next year will be infinitely worse as Micron pivots to serve only businesses, with a focus on AI data centers.

This means that Crucial-branded kits will soon vanish from shelves, as Micron effectively abandons the brand.

Micron ditches Crucial and consumers because AI ruins everything

If you’ve been following the AI debacle as it becomes clearer that the grift is nearing unstable levels of ridiculousness, you’ll know that the drive to build as many data centers as possible has become a major focus for that industry. Powering AI needs absurd levels of energy, with proposed centers to power OpenAI’s suite reaching country-level power draw.

Meanwhile, it’s been proven that data centers are major pollutants, with Elon Musk’s xAI in the middle of poisoning a town by draining its water and pumping stuff into the air.

Not only that, but a good portion of the proposed data centers from OpenAI, Nvidia, Softbank, Meta, Microsoft, the UK government, and so, so many more haven’t even been built yet. These mega data centers providing hundreds of megawatts have been continually blocked or delayed.

There’s also the fact that some of the cash and figures being chucked about aren’t even realistic. On what grounds will OpenAI hit its 220 million subscribers in 2030, when it’s estimated to be around 14 to 15 times more than what they have now in 2025?

All this hoarding of hardware for what? To preemptively hope that a data center might one day finish construction and that OpenAI actually manages to survive until 2030? Despite it burning invested billions on a machine that would be killed in its tracks if a governing body were to put a stop to it harvesting copyrighted material and the open web to generate a list that’s possibly wrong.

Just brace for pricing impact

Micron ditching consumers for the AI business is only going to hurt the consumer. AI has begun to ravage anything that comes near it, with a constant flow of news that sounds like the billionaires at the top saw into a magical orb.

A PC is already expensive enough, but this ridiculousness going on within the tech industry over its obsession with finding a problem for its solution is going to just hurt everyone.

Nvidia’s graphics cards are often unaffordable. AMD is raising its prices. Certain combinations of RAM now cost more than a PS5. SSD prices will only get more expensive as another brand leaves the market. Consoles will get more expensive, and the humble Raspberry Pi is no longer worth its entry fee compared to mini PCs in the same ballpark.

At some point, when does this stop? Probably once the bubble bursts and the entire lynchpin of the economy falters. Maybe once someone actually dies from the poisoned water around them. God, I wish I had a pin.