Micron announces that it has agreed to sell its 3D XPoint fab in Utah to Texas Instruments for $900M in cash
Micron announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to sell its Lehi, Utah fab to Texas Instruments for $900 million in cash.
Context & Ripple Effects
This sale closes out an arc that began when Micron stopped all 3D XPoint development in March 2021 and put the Lehi fab on the market — a bet that the niche memory it built with Intel no longer justified its own process roadmap. The site had been wholly Micron's since it bought out Intel's stake in their IM Flash joint venture in 2018 for $1.5B plus assumed debt.
The buyer matters as much as the seller: Texas Instruments is buying a working US fab outright at a moment when its own results — Q2 revenue up 23% year over year and a Q3 forecast above estimates — show analog chip demand outrunning available capacity.
First-order effects
- Texas Instruments gets an operating Utah fab for $900M in cash, adding owned capacity without multi-year greenfield construction risk while its backlog runs hot.
- Micron exits 3D XPoint completely, freeing capital and management attention for its core DRAM and NAND businesses.
Second-order effects
- For TI's competitors in analog and embedded chips, a rival adding a whole fab mid-cycle raises the stakes on their own capacity commitments — capacity, not design wins, becomes the near-term differentiator.
- Micron's exit narrows the specialty-memory field further: with the last 3D XPoint producer gone, customers of the technology must migrate to conventional DRAM/NAND or other NVM paths.
Third-order effects
- Fabs are behaving like tradeable real estate rather than fixed endowments — sellers shed non-core process lines, buyers with different product mixes repurpose existing shells, a pattern that shortens effective capacity cycles across the industry.
- If Micron's subsequent moves hold the pattern — the $15B Idaho fab backed by CHIPS Act support and the later Taiwan site purchase from Powerchip — the company is concentrating on volume memory while offloading or acquiring sites by strategic fit rather than geography.
The trend: Memory makers are pruning exotic, low-volume technologies to concentrate capital on DRAM and NAND at scale, while logic-centric chipmakers absorb the vacated fabs as ready-made capacity.