Intel Agrees To Sell Storage Unit To SK Hynix for $9 Billion (bloomberg.com) 49
Intel has agreed to sell its Nand memory unit to South Korea's SK Hynix for about $9 billion, a deal that allows the U.S. chipmaker to concentrate on its main business while shoring up the Asian company's position in a booming market. From a report: The chipmaker will pay 10.3 trillion won for the Intel unit, which makes flash memory components for computers and other devices. The acquisition, which will take place in stages through 2025, includes Intel's solid-state drive, Nand flash and wafer businesses, as well as a production facility in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian. The deal should shore up Hynix's position in a business that's boomed after Covid-19 drove demand for the chips used in everything from Apple's iPhones to data centers. It whittles down another player in an industry the Korean company dominates alongside Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology, potentially buoying Nand flash prices.
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WTF?
Storage Unit? (Score:2)
Hey for how much can I sell them my Public Storage unit I've been paying for since college in 1990s that I haven't bothered to cancel?
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"Today on the biggest episode most explosive episode of Storage Wars ever, newcomer Intel tries to make a name for itself!"
This is a bit worrying (Score:2)
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Natural result of the worship of profit maximization uber alles. There are always some parts of any company that are relatively less profitable, so Wall Street always reacts favorably to sales of parts because in theory it will increase the earnings per share even when the reality in practice is that the company is weakened in the future.
I think the incentive structure should be different. More human freedom. More choice. Smaller companies actually competing with each other by creating new innovations (and
Re:This is a bit worrying (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the incentive structure should be different. More human freedom. More choice. Smaller companies actually competing with each other by creating new innovations (and allowing for smaller governments, too).
What you want and what people actually pay money for are too different things. A lot of smaller companies all trying to do the same thing creates a lot of redundancy when you stop and think about it, which is why it isn't any kind of stable state for any market. Everyone always claims to want all of the things you list, but no one is ever willing to actually pay for it.
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I agree that if you boil it down to a pricing decision, then lower price wins. I'm saying that it should not be boiled down that way and that I would be willing to tolerate a system where I got more freedom even though the prices were not always minima and even though the system is less perfectly efficient than the corporate cancers want it to be. I also believe the ongoing competition will produce more progress. You seem to disagree.
But I think you're wrong for a different reason. Powerful players tend to
Re: This is a bit worrying (Score:2)
Intel's fab tech is years behind. They're stuck. (Score:4, Insightful)
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I am not concerned for Intel, they have the resources to go long here. AMD on the other and needs the cash. So this switch up is a good thing.
AMD can go long as well - they're not spending money trying to build their own chip fabs like Intel does.
Re:Intel's fab tech is years behind. They're stuck (Score:4, Interesting)
No one is concerned for Intel, fuck those fraudulent fucks. But Intel has never been behind in process technology for years before, and it's not clear that they can recover since superior process technology (and cheating on benchmarks, and compromising security) is how they came back last time.
If Intel doesn't pull a new process out of their ass, they're fucked.
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I'm not a fan of intel but the markets getting horribly small and I certainly don't want TSMC taking a large majority of the cutting edge chip market. Competition good, 1 big player bad.
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I want competition too, but I reject the idea that it has to come from Intel.
I can however conceive that it might, I just don't see evidence that it will.
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I think the chances of any other companies entering the cutting edge chip fab game are pretty small right now.
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If Intel effectively drops out, the bar to entry will be much lower.
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It won't be because of the astronomical cost of creating cutting edge chip fabs and the amount of R&D required. This is why AMD no longer builds fabs. Apple could do it, Amazon too but TBH I wouldn't particularly want a CPU from either of those two.
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All that is expensive, but it's even more expensive to have to compete with Intel and their fraud.
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This has all happened before and will happen again.
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apparently missed the Galactica reference?
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Which is itself a Peter Pan reference.
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So it is, thanks.
Intel is keeping 3D XPoint (Optane) (Score:3, Informative)
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If I remember correctly there is a fair amount of overcapacity on the nand market I do not know if we will see that space return to real profitability before the tech gets replaced by a next gen nonvolitile memory.
Now that there will be only three big players, it is expected that there will be more supply and pricing discipline, resulting in some real profitability for the industry (maybe).
Re:Intel is keeping 3D XPoint (Optane) (Score:5, Informative)
Now that there will be only three big players, it is expected that there will be more supply and pricing discipline...
The other name for supply and pricing "discipline" is illegal cartel. We've had enough criminal activity out of the southeast Asian memory manufacturers already. This sale should be blocked on anti-trust grounds. No existing flash memory manufacturer should be allowed to buy it. SK Hynix in particular is a repeat offender [theregister.com], and recently. This is not some abstract economic theory. They are virtually certain to illegally conspire to raise NAND chip prices with the remaining manufacturers, because they did it for DRAM chips repeatedly.
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Maybe this means we'll see this pushed super hard at prices more competitive with NAND flash disk. In PCI slots or NVMe slots it destroys NAND in performance but is too fucking expensive.
Maybe Intel will also start adding Optane compatible DIMM slots on their desktop chipset motherboards, allowing punters to possibly use an Optane DIMM in raw device mode.
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The joint venture with Micron ended years ago.
Wowzers (Score:2)
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A storage unit for $9B?! Was it stacked to the rafters with gold bricks? Must have been one of those big 12'x12' climate controlled units.
I heard the storage unit was filled with chip fab equipment.
Looking out for Q4 profits! (Score:2)
Since these use completely different fabrication technologies, it's quite clear that this has nothing to do with "[allowing] the U.S. chipmaker to concentrate on its main business" and everything to with improving fourth quarter profit report. Intel is hemorrhaging and needs a win badly but since they cannot they have begun cannibalizing themselves to keep their stock price elevated.
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Thought we were supposed to be bringing stuff back (Score:3)
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Trump will be out in a few weeks and we can go back to the sensible way of doing things.
Like most of Trumps plans: "Bringing things back" makes the poor guy poorer (it raises prices) and the rich guys richer (ie. him and his pals down at the country club).
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um, details matter (Score:2)
Intel shipped that manufacturing to the city of Dalian, China long ago (before Trump was in office). All this does is transfer the management of that Chinese production from Intel to US Ally South Korea. I'm opposed to ANY tech transfer to China and I'd love to see somebody dig-up the identities of all the American semiconductor execs of the past 3 decades who have transferred this stuff to China and try them all for Treason, that's how seriously I take this tech transfer to the super-fascist mono-racial Ch
AMD Heat (Score:3)
If so, this deal might make strategic sense: it frees Intel up to focus on their core business (processors - and no pun intended) and it gives them a huge chunk of cash to take the fight to AMD.
Obviously this is just me guessing, but that sort of war chest might allow Intel to throw some pretty steep discounts on to their chips, maybe allow them to sell them at a loss or break-even for a period, just to steal the thunder from AMD.
Interesting to see where this might go...
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The writing on the well is that the rent-a-fabs will win. No vertically integrated fab company can compete with the TSMC's of the world.
Intel will eventually restructure itself into a CPU design company, because thats where the name is most valuable, with spin-offs and division sales, like happened to AT&T, before the name was eventually sold to SBC.
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Absolutely. This reminds me of when General Motors sold their GMAC financing division. At the time, it was the only profitable division they had. It was a move of desperation. Although other posts here seem to indicate that the race-to-the-bottom on NAND pricing meant the division wasn't profitable any more, and that intel is still keeping it's Optane memory division. (Although - I thought Optane was dead... maybe it's still a thing in the server market?)
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The best idea I could come up with is that somewhere deep in Intel they have a long-range roadmap that keeps processors and primary storage tightly coupled for performance purposes. If that was the case and if any such planning were to exist, chances are that it would be somewhere in the Optane division of the company and may therefore be something that Intel would want to hold on to.
My only other theory was that Intel may recognize the need to tune the pe
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The only way keeping Optane makes much sense is if they have a plan to use that tech and make it cheaper bigger faster. It only accelerates a few workloads.
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Presumably they could sell the Optane business but hold on to the patents if they wanted... except of course that might be a less attractive offer to prospective buyers, even if the rights on offer were "perpetual, non-exclusive" in nature.
I ask only because it's possible that Intel have something there that, whilst not profitable, includes patents that are being used to effectively stifle compe