Micron in talks to sell its Lehi, Utah, fab

Micron will increase investment in new memory products that leverage the Compute Express Link (CXL), the recently introduced industry standard interface that enables flexible connection between compute, memory and storage. With immediate effect, Micron will cease development of 3D XPoint and shift resources to focus on accelerating market introduction of CXL-enabled memory products. “Memory and storage are critical to the data economy, and the need for data center memory innovation has never been greater,” says Micron President and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra in a press release. “As a leader in memory and storage, Micron is committed to leading innovation to unleash the next generation of data centers. Today’s announcement reflects our focus to invest in high-value solutions for customers that also deliver strong shareholder returns.” The company says that the CXL interface opens up new paths for platform innovation and optimisation in the data center. Micron sees immense promise in new classes of memory-centric solutions that utilise CXL to scale the capacity, performance and content required by applications to run on infrastructure with greater architectural freedom. In addition, Micron has now determined that there is insufficient market validation to justify the ongoing high levels of investments required to successfully commercialise 3D XPoint at scale to address the evolving memory and storage needs of its customers. Micron says that these portfolio changes will not impact the company’s overall technology investment levels as its focus on emerging memory solutions remains unchanged. In line with this new strategic focus, Micron is engaged in discussions for the sale of its Lehi, Utah, fab currently dedicated to 3D XPoint production. The company aims to reach a sale agreement within calendar year 2021.