Intel Corp (INTC)

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Memory is an interesting market for Intel. I don't think that they will ever become a major general purpose memory supplier ala Samsung or Micron; these markets are cutthroat and if you don't have the best technology, you are basically going to be at a huge cost structure disadvantage and you'll lose a lot of money (see: Micron's financials).

What Intel seems to be doing is to try to go after high value segments of the memory market, that is areas where competition is much scarcer and Intel's competitive advantages are much more apparent.

Think enterprise-grade solid state drives, ultra-high end client solid state drives, and 3DXPoint memory modules.

The last one is probably the most interesting as Intel can leverage its dominance of the server market to sell these. If 3DXPoint DIMMs require Intel Xeon processors to work, then Intel not only has a weapon with which to protect its server processor/platform sales, but it also has an opportunity to significantly grow its content share in servers. Intel doesn't make standard DDR memory so any replacement of DDR memory with 3DXpoint DIMMs is upside for Intel.

Anyway, in the near-term the memory business is bleeding money (investments in starting up factories + harsh NAND flash pricing environment), but over the long-term it could be an interesting biz. Not interesting enough to drive huge upside to the financials/stock, but we are talking potentially billions in incremental revenue which isn't bad.