After almost a decade of investments and slow progress, Micron announced on Tuesday that it is ending its involvement in the development of 3D XPoint, a non-volatile memory technology, which was originally developed in partnership with Intel.
As it stops all research & development on 3D XPoint technology, the company said that it is also shutting down and selling its fab factory in Lehi, Utah, where the memory is manufactured.
In a statement released by the company, Micron said that the current levels of market validation do not justify the investments needed to commercialize at scale.
Where is Micron headed now?
The company said that it is shifting investments into memory products that use (CXL) Compute Express Link. It is an open interconnect standard that maintains CPU-device memory coherence. Micron is sure that its overall investment in this will be constant.
The CXL interface opens up new paths for platforms to innovate and optimize operations in the datacenter.
The company cited the rapidly growing data demands and the widespread presence of AI workloads, saying that it sees potential in offering new classes of memory-centric solutions utilizing CXL to scale several things.
Micron pivots
The company says that the decision was driven by its assessment of the 3D XPoint market opportunity given the expected impact of CXL and its new emerging memory products on the future datacenter.
From what Micron’s President and Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Mehrotra said on a conference call with investors, it seems that the company expects a higher return on investments it will be making. The company reported that it was losing about $400 million a year on the now ended 3D XPoint project.
Intel says it will still work on Intel Optane as planned with no changes.
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