Intel Announces It Will Completely Exit the Orthon Business, Losing $3.7 Billion

In its second quarter earnings report, Intel mentioned that "we began phasing out our Intel Athon memory business." This indicates that the end is near for the Athon memory business which has been losing money.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger (Pat Kissinger) also confirmed on the earnings call that he will be shutting down the Athon memory business. By some counts, this is the sixth non-core business that CEO Pat Gelsinger has "sold off", including the recent sale of the drone business to Elon Musk's brother and the sale of the SSD storage unit to SK hynix for $1.5 billion to invest in Intel's core business areas.

In a response obtained by the foreign press, Intel sees the closure of Aoton as part of a strategy to optimize the product portfolio to support IDM 2.0, and they will also stop future product development, but will continue to support Aoton's stock of customers during the transition period.

Intel's shutdown of Aoton resulted in a loss of $559 million (about Rs. 3.7 billion), which would have included an impairment of Aoton's inventory and compensation for failure to perform.

It is worth noting that Intel appears to have been forced to shut down its Aoton memory business after the dissolution of IMFT (IM Flash Technologies, Intel Micron's joint venture semiconductor company), which left Micron with the sole manufacturing facility for 3D XPoint, before Micron abandoned its own 3D XPoint program and sold the facility to Texas Instruments in 2021, which Intel has no way to produce the 3D Xpoint chips needed for Aoton, and Intel will likely stop further exploration of 3D XPoint technology.

Intel has a number of products under its Athon sub-brand, including Athon memory, Athon persistent memory and Athon SSDs, but the company previously divided all of its products into the "Athon memory business," so this gradual closure may be of the entire Athon division, not just Athon memory products.

Aton technology is a high-speed storage technology introduced by Intel that has been hailed by many as a "Moore's Law disruptor" and is comprised of 3D XPoint memory media, Intel memory and storage controllers, Intel Interconnect IP and Intel software. The 3D XPoint memory media is the cornerstone of the Athon technology.