U.S. memory chip giant Micron Technology has announced that it plans to stop selling memory products to individual consumers in the PC/DIY market, so that it can focus its capacity on supplying enough memory products for compute clusters powered by high-performance AI chips.

The AI boom has led to exponential expansion in data center scale, driving a surge in demand for DRAM and NAND products. Micron has made the tough decision to exit the consumer business in order to increase supply and support for large strategic customers in faster-growing segments.

Micron’s statement is the latest sign of tightening supply and clearly shows that the unprecedented boom in AI compute infrastructure is creating severe shortages for key input components such as memory.

At the same time, U.S. tech giants and various sovereign entities are pledging to invest hundreds of billions of dollarsover the coming years to build massive AI data centers. As a result, computer memory used for short-term storage on consumer devices and SSD/HDD products used for long-term storage are facing a sharp global shortage.

Current high-end AI chips such as GB200, MI350, and Ironwood TPU require nearly 200GB to close to 300GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) per system.

On top of that, cloud providers’ multi-year, hundred-billion-dollar AI infrastructure spending plans mean that the marginal unit demand and unit profitability for data center HBM, DDR5, and high-end enterprise storage are far higher than for the fragmented, highly price-transparent, and low-bargaining-power retail market for consumer memory and SSDs.

Market Commentary:

From the perspective of the corporate earnings cycle, Micron’s decision to cut its consumer-facing business and fully pivot toward AI memory for data centers is essentially a capacity reallocation that reflects a strong cyclical call and a structural upgrade in its business mix.