Micron officially announced that it is letting go of its 3D Xpoint (pronounced Cross Point) fabrication facility and that it is selling off the plant to Texas Instruments (TI). The announcement comes a month after the company said that it would cease production of the memory and as per its official press statement, TM agreed to take the plant off Micron’s hand to the tune of US$1.5 billion (~RM6.25 billion).
Payment for the 3D Xpoint facility will be broken up into two parts: Micron says TI will pay US$900 (~RM3.75 billion) in cash via a sales transaction, while the remaining US$600 million (~RM2.5 billion) will come from the sale of select tools and other assets. Micron also said that, while some of the assets will be sold, it will still retain the remainder of the tools and redeploy them to other manufacturing sites or even sell them at a later date. Depending on its situation at the time.
Micron’s 3D Xpoint memory technology first came on to the scene back in 2015 when it partnered with Intel. One of the goals of the partnership was to create a memory technology that would be significantly faster than NAND; Intel’s Optane memory lineup was born from the collaboration and served as the poster child for the technology for the next several years.
However, despite launching a handful of Optane products with 3D Xpoint technology, it barely gained any traction and in 2018, Intel ended its partnership. As for Micron, the company has since focused on providing memory solutions for data centres.
