Intel Sold Its NAND Memory Business for About $9 Billion. Micron Is Now Worth More Than Twice What Intel Is.

In October 2020, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) agreed to sell its NAND memory and storage business to SK Hynix (NASDAQ:SKHY) for $9 billion. The package included Intel's solid-state drive business, its NAND components and wafers, and its factory in Dalian, China.

One thing I want to be clear about from the start: the buyer was SK Hynix, not Micron (NASDAQ:MU). Micron's role here is as a measuring stick -- the biggest American memory company, and the closest thing to a pure-play gauge of what the memory business became after Intel left it.

That measuring stick says a lot. Micron's market value stands near $1.05 trillion as of this writing. Intel's is about $464 billion. So was the exit a mistake?

Image source: Intel.

The 2020 exit

The sale unfolded in two steps. SK Hynix paid $7.0 billion at the first closing, at the end of 2021, taking the drive business and the Dalian factory and standing up a new subsidiary, Solidigm, to run the drives.

The remainder of the deal (the NAND technology, intellectual property, and the people behind them) transferred on March 27, 2025, with Intel collecting about $1.9 billion, net of adjustments.

Intel said at the time of the announcement that it intended to put the proceeds toward "long-term growth priorities, including artificial intelligence, 5G networking and the intelligent, autonomous edge."

What Intel mostly built instead, of course, was manufacturing. The centerpiece of the company's strategy today is Intel Foundry, the contract chipmaking arm. Its segment revenue grew 31% year over year to $5.8 billion in the second quarter, a figure that includes the work it does for Intel's own product groups. And it still posted a $2.1 billion operating loss.

Overall, Intel's total revenue rose 25% to $16.1 billion in that quarter, its fastest growth in years. But profitability at the foundry hasn't arrived.

Memory became the bottleneck

For a while, the exit looked well-timed. After all, memory prices collapsed in 2022 and 2023, and Micron posted a $5.83 billion net loss in its fiscal 2023 as its annual revenue nearly halved. NAND, the specific business Intel sold, took a beating.

Intel, meanwhile, had collected $7.0 billion before the worst of it and never had to fund the losses.

Then artificial intelligence (AI) rewired the industry's economics. Data centers built for AI need enormous amounts of memory, and prices have surged as demand outruns supply.

Showing just how much the industry has changed, SK Hynix's second-quarter revenue of 79.3 trillion won was up 257% year over year, and its operating margin reached 76%. Both were records. Add the 52.6 trillion won it booked in the first quarter, and first-half revenue crossed 100 trillion won for the first time in the company's history. It said high-performance products for AI servers led price increases across both DRAM and NAND.

As for Micron, its trillion-dollar valuation mostly rides on DRAM and the high-bandwidth memory feeding AI data centers -- businesses Intel wasn't selling in 2020. The headline comparison, then, isn't asset for asset. It measures what happened to the industry Intel left, and to the one it stayed in, over the same stretch.

Grading the exit

The 2020 logic was defensible. NAND was a commodity business that demanded constant capital, Intel was fighting to fix its core manufacturing, and something had to go.

The thinking was that a focused company would beat a sprawling one. And the 2022 downturn briefly made the sellers look like the smart ones.

After a decade covering tech stocks, though, what stands out to me is the direction of the trade. Intel exited the corner of the industry where AI has since created scarcity, and it used the room to double down on a business that still loses money every quarter.

And SK Hynix, the actual buyer, is now flush enough that its board approved buying back about $29 billion of its own stock over three months.

To be fair, Intel likely couldn't have funded both paths. The foundry build-out has consumed far more than $9 billion, and carrying NAND through the 2023 downturn would have cost it more before today's prices arrived.

Ultimately, the scoreboard is what it is. The $9 billion was arguably a fair price for what Intel sold in 2020. Micron's value has since climbed to more than twice Intel's, and the business Intel kept building hasn't yet shown it can earn what memory now earns.

On today's numbers, the exit is the more expensive decision. Of course, memory is a cyclical business, so the gap may narrow again with the next downturn. What would change the grade for good is the foundry earning real money, and it hasn't yet.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Intel and Micron Technology. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.