Intel Expands Investment in Non-Volatile Memory in Dalian, China

From Rob Crooke, SVP, GM, non-volatile memory solutions group, Intel

Intel Corporation announced plans to increase its investment in non-volatile memory technology to better serve customer needs and keep pace with the strong demand for company’s SSD solutions.

Non-volatile memory-based SSDs are a strong adjacency to company’s core computing business and a key part of company’s strategy to be a foundational supplier of the infrastructure that powers the smart, connected world. This combined with a fast growing market, present great opportunities to drive business growth for Intel.

This year, company’s SSD)solutions revenue grew double-digits year-on-year every quarter. In addition, Intel and Micron Technology, Inc. introduced the jointly developed 3D NAND and 3D XPoint technologies, ensuring a strong future product portfolio that continues to be well received by our customers. Our partnership with Micron remains very strong.

For our part, we are aggressively working on bringing company’s Optane technology – based on 3D XPoint – to market in company’s SSDs in 2016. These products have the potential to revolutionize any device, applicatin or service that benefits from fast access to large sets of data. For example, retailers may use company’s non-volatile memory products to more quickly identify fraud detection patterns in financial transactions; and healthcare researchers could process and analyze larger data sets in real time, accelerating complex tasks such as genetic analysis and disease tracking.

Today, I am pleased to announce that we now will utilize company’s facility in Dalian, China to help expand our manufacturing capacity in non-volatile memory. The expansion is part of our global multi-source supply strategy and will allow us to best serve our customers. We expect initial production of the 3D NAND technology in Dalian in the second half of 2016.

We have a long-term plan for this facility and may invest up to $5.5 billion over the coming years to transition this site to support non-volatile memory production. The company’s Dalian facility has been in operation since 2010, producing 65-nanometer products for Intel. The collaboration with the Dalian government has been and continues to be an excellent partnership, and our team at Intel Dalian has demonstrated amazing results through operational excellence.