Micron claimed last year that it would buy out Intel’s share of the joint venture, called IM Flash Technologies, for $1.5 billion in cash and the assumption of $1 billion of Intel’s share of the venture’s debt. The deal will close this month, making Micron in full control of a factory built in Utah to make the chips.

 

Hard drives made with the new chips are really fast than previous solid-state drives. That has captured the interest of data center owners working on computing jobs like deep learning, where artificial intelligence software ingests gigantic amounts of data to learn new tasks. Intel released a second generation of its version of the technology earlier this year. Micron is now entering the market, testing it with what a handful of customers.

 

“This is just the very, very beginning,” Micron Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra told Reuters at a launch event in San Francisco. “These kinds of technologies do take multiple years before are they broadly deployed.”

 

Micron released its Intel competitor Thursday, a device it calls X100. The device itself is a hard drive that can be plugged directly into a server, and Micron remarks it is faster than its rival due in part to a piece of technology called a controller that take instructions from the server’s computing brain about which data to read or write on the hard drive. Micron developed the controllers internally and is dreaming they will set its products apart in the memory market, where supply and demand dynamics can produce dramatic shifts in prices.

 

Mehrotra’s strategy since taking over as chief executive in 2017 has been to increase the number of storage products that include technologies beyond just commodity memory chips. Around half of the company’s storage revenue now comes from such products, versus 20% when he arrived, he said. “This is hugely attractive,” Mehrotra said of differentiating features. “We are making strong progress there.”

 

TRONSERVE