Micron announced today that it is selling its 3D XPoint fab in Leti, Utah, bringing an end to its production of the radical new memory technology that it developed with Intel. The company plans to sell the fab by the end of 2021 and exit the 3D XPoint business entirely as it ceases all further development of 3D XPoint-based products due to tepid demand that the company says has "insufficient market validation to justify the ongoing high levels of investments required to successfully commercialize 3D XPoint at scale[..]."

Intel and Micron developed the revolutionary 3D XPoint persistent memory, which melds the speed of DRAM with the persistence of data storage devices, in a joint effort that spanned a decade, with the first formal announcement coming in 2015 .

Intel and Micron dissolved the joint development effort in 2018 , with Micron buying out Intel's share of the business for $1.5 billion, but Intel continues to use 3D XPoint as the underlying storage medium for its Optane products. Intel has long relied upon Micron for its supply of 3D XPoint, and the two companies have a supply agreement that lasts until the end of the year.

Intel also fabs its own 3D XPoint media in a New Mexico fab, but it's unclear how much volume the company currently produces. While Intel is in the process of selling its own NAND flash and SSD businesses to SK hynix , it's fully possible that it could be a potential suitor to purchase Micron's Utah fab, though that seems unlikely.

Intel's own efforts to productize Optane, which uses the 3D XPoint media, have met with a slow but steady uptake in the data center, but fizzled in the consumer market. As such, Intel ceased production of all Optane devices for desktop PCs in January 2021. The company continues to develop both storage and memory DIMMs for the enterprise markets. In fact, Intel recently unveiled its new Optane SSD P5800X for servers. This new device brings second-gen Optane to market for the first time, signaling that Intel remains committed to using the exotic memory for the enterprise market.

Micron announced several of its own storage devices based on 3D XPoint memory, like the QuantX and X100 , but neither product made it to market.

Micron says that it will shift its focus to developing memory products based on Compute Express Link (CXL) memory devices, an open memory standard that ties together memory and processors, but says it "plans to apply the knowledge it has gained from the breakthroughs achieved through its 3D XPoint initiative, as well as related engineering expertise and resources, to new types of memory-centric products that target the memory-storage hierarchy."

We've reached out to Intel for comment and will update as necessary.