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Wednesday 17 March 2021

Micron Technology has announced updates to the company's portfolio strategy to further strengthen its focus on memory and storage innovations for the data center, with plans to cease the development of 3D XPoint technology and put its fab dedicated to 3D XPoint production up for sale.

Micron indicated it 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.

The broad proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) and advances in data analytics are driving workload requirements that necessitate a change to compute architectures. The CXL interface opens up new paths for platform innovation and optimization in the data center, Micron indicated. Micron added it sees immense promise in new classes of memory-centric solutions that utilize CXL to scale the capacity, performance and content required by applications to run on infrastructure with greater architectural freedom.

In addition, Micron has determined that there is insufficient market validation to justify the ongoing high levels of investments required to successfully commercialize 3D XPoint at scale to address the evolving memory and storage needs of its customers. Micron's portfolio changes do not impact the company's overall technology investment levels as its focus on emerging memory solutions remains unchanged. Micron plans to apply the knowledge it has gained from the breakthroughs achieved through its 3D XPoint initiative, as well as related engineering expertise and resources, to new types of memory-centric products that target the memory-storage hierarchy.

In line with this new strategic focus, Micron said it 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.