The Intel NAND sale to SK hynix, agreed in 2020 for roughly $9 billion, looked like smart strategy at the time, but market figures on Saturday, 29 August 2026 showed Micron worth more than double Intel.
Intel structured the deal in two phases, taking the bulk of the money at the first close at the end of 2021 for the solid state drive (SSD) business and its fabrication plant in Dalian, China, with the balance paid on completion in 2025, as reported by The Motley Fool.
What the Intel NAND sale actually handed over
The sale covered Intel’s NAND flash memory operation, the non-volatile storage that keeps data when the power goes off, along with the SSD business built on top of it.
Intel held back Optane, its separate memory line built on 3D XPoint technology co-developed with Micron, and kept that in-house.
At the time the logic scanned well. Memory was a brutal, cyclical business with thin margins and heavy capital demands, and Intel wanted the cash and the focus for its processor and foundry ambitions.
Shedding a commodity division to fund the core product was ordinary corporate housekeeping.
Why HBM turned memory into the hottest seat in silicon
HBM was the nerdy acronym at the centre of this. High-bandwidth memory stacked DRAM chips vertically and wired them straight into a processor, so an AI accelerator could be fed data fast enough to keep its maths units busy rather than idling while it waited.
The neat twist was that HBM was not built from NAND at all. SK hynix bought Intel’s flash business, then rode a separate DRAM line to the front of the HBM market that feeds AI data centre chips, with Samsung Electronics and Micron chasing it.
Demand did the rest. Industry appetite left large portions of AI-related memory capacity effectively sold out years in advance, which turned a low-margin commodity into a scarce input, and scarcity was what rewrote the economics of the whole category.
The scoreboard showed the shift plainly. Micron’s market value stood at roughly $1.05 trillion, more than double Intel’s approximately $464 billion, a gap that widened sharply as AI turned memory from a boom-and-bust sideline into a strategic necessity. Micron had been Intel’s partner on 3D XPoint.
Where the Intel NAND sale leaves the balance of power
Completion came in 2025, when the last payment landed and closed a transaction negotiated for a market that no longer existed in the same shape. SK hynix collected a business priced in 2020, and its board had since approved a buyback of about $29 billion of its own stock over three months.
Whether Intel could buy back into memory was the open question, and re-entering would mean building fabrication capacity in a market already sold out years ahead.
The company’s route back to relevance ran through its processor and foundry business instead, which was the thing the $9 billion was meant to fund.
