SK Hynix buys Intel's NAND business for US$9 billion

Fans of Intel’s SSDs will have to buy their next storage drive from SK Hynix. The Korean memory manufacturer has purchased Intel’s NAND business for US$9 billion.

The acquisition includes Intel’s NAND SSD and component divisions as well as the Dalian NAND memory factory in China. Intel will continue to manufacture its Optane memory.

The deal will be finalized, pending government approvals, in late 2021. After the contracts are approved, SK Hynix will pay $7 billion for the Dalian manufacturing facility and Intel’s SSD IPs and employees. The remaining businesses will transfer to SK Hynix in March 2025 for $2 billion.

Intel’s quadruple level cell SSDs have done relatively well in the market, accounting for about $2.8 billion of revenue in the first half of 2020.

Seok-Hee Lee, CEO of SK Hynix, said that the deal would greatly benefit SK Hynix:

By taking each other’s strengths and technologies, SK Hynix will proactively respond to various needs from customers and optimize our business structure, expanding our innovative portfolio in the NAND flash market segment, which will be comparable with what we achieved in DRAM.

Intel’s CEO Bob Swan said the sale would allow Intel to “prioritize [Intel’s] investments in differentiated technology where [it] can play a bigger role in the success of [its] customers and deliver attractive returns to [its] stockholders.”