Back in February we speculated that Intel might exit its Optane memory business. In its latest earnings release, Intel stated that “in the second quarter of 2022, we initiated the liquidation of our Intel Optane memory business.” The earnings report also noted that Intel will take a $559 million “Optane memory defect” charge this quarter. Below is a picture of an Optane SSD.
In January 2021, Intel said it would stop shipping most Optane-based products for consumer applications (eg gaming). In March 2021, Micron, Intel’s former 3D XPoint partner (the name of the joint project for Intel’s Optane memory) said it was no longer developing 3D XPoint and later in the year sold the plant from Lehi Utah where he manufactured 3D XPoint for Intel and his own use, at IT.
Intel sold off much of its memory business when it announced in December 2021 that it was selling its SSD and NAND business to SK hynix, including Intel’s NAND factory in Delian, China. This business unit is now called Solidigm (a subsidiary of SK hynix). Going out of business Optane pretty much completes the company’s exit from selling memory products.
Intel’s earnings message leaves open the possibility that Intel could sell its Optane business to another company, as it did with its NAND and SSD business. Optane has been incorporated into storage and memory systems by several companies. These companies need to consider what their next steps might be.
However, we believe that Intel has been subsidizing its Optane products in order to keep the price low enough to generate demand (about half the price of DRAM, in $/GB). The idea would be to subsidize the product until manufacturing volume brought costs down below the price they had to sell for in order to complement the DRAM memory. Also, Intel had indicated for a few years that they saw Optane bundled with the company’s server chips as a differentiator from other server CPU companies.
Intel says it is ending its Optane memory business. It remains to be seen whether Optane will be resurrected elsewhere or simply scrapped. But it’s clear that Intel no longer sees Optane as part of its future.
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