If you follow and read Neowin you are probably quite familiar with Crucial memory and drives. The company is, or rather, was essentially the consumer division of Micron. For those who may not know, Micron is one of the three biggest memory chip makers in the world alongside Samsung and SK hynix.
Micron in a press release has announced that it has made the "difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business" although this step has been taken to in fact make much more money elsewhere. Recently memory prices have been through the roof due to the excessive demand for them, as AI and ML workloads love to gobble up RAM, which in turn has created a massive surge in the demand for such memory and related items, and thus RAM prices are at all time high.
The situation is similar to the exorbitantly high GPU prices due to cryptocurrency mining back in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology, stated: "The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. 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."
Thus Micron sees the opportunity it has on its hands and is essentially abandoning the consumer side. It is sort of similar to how many of the GPU companies like Nvidia and AMD are operating nowadays, where they are prioritizing their AI enterprise customers over consumer gaming needs since the former is something that probably makes them a lot more money.