Intel to invest up to $5.5 billion in 3D NAND production in Dailan, China

Intel Senior Vice President Rob Crooke announced the chip giant will be investing up to $5.5 billion over the coming years in its Dalian, China plant to upgrade the facility for state-of-the-art non-volatile memory production. Intel said it expects to start initial production of 3D NAND technology in Dalian in the second half of 2016.

Here's Crooke's full statement:

2015 has definitely been a “memory-able” year for Intel! Non-volatile memory-based solid state drives are a strong adjacency to Intel’s core computing business and a key part of Intel’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, Intel® Solid State Drive (Intel® SSD) solutions revenue grew double-digits year-on-year every quarter. In addition, Intel and Micron 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 Intel® Optane™ technology – based on 3D XPoint – to market in Intel® SSDs in 2016. These products have the potential to revolutionize any device, application or service that benefits from fast access to large sets of data. For example, retailers may use Intel’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 Intel’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 leading-edge non-volatile memory production. The Intel 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.

I look forward to many more successful years of continued innovation and growth for Intel.

Rob Crooke
Senior Vice President,
General Manager Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group