After the sale of the drone division to the brother of Elon Musk and that inherent to SSD drives a SK Hynix, Intel announced, on the occasion of the call relating to the earnings report for the second quarter of 2022, that will close its Optane memory business. The operation will result in a stock liquidation of 559 million dollars. Colleagues from the American division of Tom’s Hardware asked for further clarification directly from the Santa Clara company, which replied:
We continue to streamline our portfolio to support our IDM 2.0 strategy. This includes evaluating the divestment of businesses that are not profitable enough or are not critical to our strategic objectives. After careful consideration, Intel plans to discontinue development of future products as part of the Optane business. We are committed to supporting Optane customers during the transition.
Already a couple of years ago, Intel had announced the cancellation of its line of Optane SSD for the consumer market. Specifically, the Santa Clara company had stopped production of the Optane Memory M10 SSD, 800P, 900P And 905Prepresenting the entire Optane family for desktop PCs.
The CEO of the company, Pat Gelsingercited the industry’s shift to CXL-based architectures as the reason for closing the Optane business, continuing the trend pioneered by Micron, the only high-volume maker of 3D XPoint – the memory Intel used to make Optane – which it sold its factory at Texas Instruments, leaving Intel with no manufacturing facilities of its own.
According to some analysts, Intel was continuing to supply Optane memory thanks to the stock accumulated by Micron before the closure of the factory, which should have been sufficient for a few more years. This would also explain the combined $ 559 million worth of stock liquidation.
