Semiconductor History | Solidigm, San Jose, December 2021 — Intel Sold the Flash Business and Kept the One That Died First

The drive in the photograph carries the Intel name on a business that stopped being Intel's. On 19 October 2020 Intel signed an agreement to sell its NAND memory business to SK hynix for nine billion dollars. The Korean announcement went out under the following day's date, which is what a time difference does to a headline. What changed hands was the whole flash operation: the SSD business, the NAND component and wafer business, and the memory fab at Dalian in China. What did not was Optane. Intel expressly excluded its 3D XPoint line, the technology it had spent five years describing as a new tier sitting between memory and storage. The structure was unusual. Payment came in two closings, seven billion dollars at the first and two billion at the second, with more than three years between them. At the first closing, in December 2021, the SSD business and the Dalian fab passed to SK hynix, and the American operation was stood up as a wholly owned subsidiary at this address in San Jose. It was named Solidigm. Robert Crooke, who had run Intel's non-volatile memory group, became its chief executive. Intel then went on manufacturing NAND wafers in a fab it no longer owned, under an agreement that ran until the final closing, because the wafer intellectual property stayed behind until then. That arrangement ended on 27 March 2025. Intel's filing records the second closing and a payment of about 1.9 billion dollars net of adjustments, with the intellectual property, the research staff and the Dalian workforce transferring at last. The part Intel kept did not outlive the part it sold. In its second-quarter results for 2022 the company said it had begun winding down the Optane business and took a 559 million dollar charge against the inventory. Seven months, then, between handing over the flash business to concentrate on Optane and abandoning Optane. The flash business is still shipping, under a different name, from this building. The photograph is an Intel solid-state drive from 2011, a decade before any of it. Nothing freely licensed shows the offices. Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons