<story><title>Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B</title><url>https://news.skhynix.com/sk-hynix-to-acquire-intel-nand-memory-business/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathattack</author><text>It’s natural for large tech companies to enter the harvesting business when they can’t innovate anymore.  Look at IBM. They just can’t innovate, so they do all kinds of financial engineering on the back of a robust customer audit program.&lt;p&gt;Eventually that money gets recycled into funding earlier stage companies.  (If a company buys back stock, the old investors have to put the money somewhere)</text></item><item><author>bnt</author><text>The real shitshow starts when the CFO becomes the CEO (as is usually the case), so Intel is pretty much dead as is US tech innovation on this scale (until VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software).</text></item><item><author>lend000</author><text>Intel&amp;#x27;s NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane (not included in the sale) and lagging behind Hynix and Samsung, so I guess this isn&amp;#x27;t such a bad move. The cynical take is that the CFO running Intel is attempting a bunch of standard corporate restructuring strategies to delay the effects of their slowing technical innovation. It is definitely concerning from a US technical superiority standpoint to consider that this same CFO may soon try to sell off some of their more competitive fabs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>StillBored</author><text>Its not that large companies can&amp;#x27;t innovate (re: IBM) its that they can&amp;#x27;t cannibalize their high margin businesses on risky strategies until its too late.&lt;p&gt;This happens over and over, intel wasn&amp;#x27;t willing to bet on low margin phone SoC&amp;#x27;s at the expensive of their laptop&amp;#x2F;server business. Now those low margin SoC providers are selling a billion chips a quarter and financing a manufacturing behemoth that intel can&amp;#x27;t keep up with. Same thing with IBM,  porting zos&amp;#x2F;ztpf&amp;#x2F;aix&amp;#x2F;i5&amp;#x2F;etc to x86 and making servers wasn&amp;#x27;t something they could justify, so they spun the business off to lenovo which grew it 5x, and now IBM is stuck with hardware they can&amp;#x27;t get enough volume on in a shrinking (but high margin!) business.&lt;p&gt;If they were selling POWER10 blue pi&amp;#x27;s for $50 they might have a chance in the edge space or IoT, but that might cannibalize the business elsewhere.</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B</title><url>https://news.skhynix.com/sk-hynix-to-acquire-intel-nand-memory-business/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mathattack</author><text>It’s natural for large tech companies to enter the harvesting business when they can’t innovate anymore.  Look at IBM. They just can’t innovate, so they do all kinds of financial engineering on the back of a robust customer audit program.&lt;p&gt;Eventually that money gets recycled into funding earlier stage companies.  (If a company buys back stock, the old investors have to put the money somewhere)</text></item><item><author>bnt</author><text>The real shitshow starts when the CFO becomes the CEO (as is usually the case), so Intel is pretty much dead as is US tech innovation on this scale (until VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software).</text></item><item><author>lend000</author><text>Intel&amp;#x27;s NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane (not included in the sale) and lagging behind Hynix and Samsung, so I guess this isn&amp;#x27;t such a bad move. The cynical take is that the CFO running Intel is attempting a bunch of standard corporate restructuring strategies to delay the effects of their slowing technical innovation. It is definitely concerning from a US technical superiority standpoint to consider that this same CFO may soon try to sell off some of their more competitive fabs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragontamer</author><text>IBM&amp;#x27;s chips seem pretty innovative to me. A large amount of IBM&amp;#x27;s software is stagnant though.&lt;p&gt;OpenCAPI, SMT4... and POWER10 has those GDDR modules coming for ~1000GBps memory bandwidths.</text></comment>