In March, we told you that Micron announced that it was abandoning the manufacture and development of XPoint 3D souvenir, ending its partnership with Intel for this development and, in effect, putting its factory up for sale. Today, just three and a half months after the announcement, the company confirmed that the sale of its plant in Utah, United States, is closed to Texas Instruments for a total value of approximately $ 1,500 million. What repercussions will this sale have?
The definitive agreement to sell Micron’s XPoint 3D memory plant in Lehi, Utah has already been signed and the buyer is Texas Instruments. The economic value of the sale is $ 1.5 billion divided into $ 900 million in cash and approximately $ 600 million in value of tools and other selected assets. Micron has already sold some of these assets and will keep the rest to reassign it to other manufacturing sites or sell it to other buyers.
XPoint 3D memory is no longer from Micron, will IT continue to develop?
Micron’s plant in Utah is home to a highly skilled team with experience in all aspects of advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Texas Instruments will offer all such workers the opportunity to become their employees at the close of the sale, and while they intend to implement their own methods and technologies in the plant, they will respect all employees who choose to stay. Although the deal has already been signed, the sale is expected to take effect later this year.
As we said at the start, Micron announced that it was putting its XPoint 3D memory factory up for sale in March of this year, at the same time as it was already confirming its intention to stop production of such solutions. memory to find other types of data center products enabled by the CXL interconnect. CXL delivers high performance connectivity for compute, memory and storage, meeting the growing demands of the data center workload that is now just the use of 3D XPoint memory.
Now, what remains to be seen are Texas Instruments’ plans in this regard. We cannot forget that this factory which now belongs to them was born from a collaboration between Intel and Micron, but currently Texas Instruments has no relation with Intel and it will be necessary to see if there is an approach to try to promote the new development. of this technology or if, on the contrary, they are satisfied with what they have and simply continue to manufacture it but without seeking to improve its development.
The truth is, it’s true that XPoint 3D technology never took off. After 9 years of development, which ended in 2019, only Intel was Micron’s client concerning this technology and, indeed, if Micron decided to abandon this activity it is because it was not generating profits but quite the contrary. Of course, Texas Instruments is a company that has the potential to make a difference (at least as long as Intel remains a customer), but just by looking at the price it paid for this technology (1,500 million c ‘ is very little, really) surely They must have something thought about for the future, so we will have to be attentive to TI’s own announcement because the one we are talking about today is from Micron and not from them.
