Rumor: Apple in talks to buy Israeli flash memory chip maker Anobit
People have been wondering what should Apple do with its cash hoard since the dawn of time and the company’s silence on the matter has only fueled speculation and increased pressure on the new CEO to pay a cash dividend, which they had stopped doing in 1995. If TechCrunch is to be believed, which relayed a Calcalist report in Hebrew, Apple is going to spend between $400 and $500 million to acquire Anobit, a fabless flash memory chip maker based in Israel.
To put this in perspective, the Anobit acquisition would be bigger than any since the 1997 purchase of NeXT for $404 million that brought back Steve Jobs. Anobit specializes in flash storage solutions for enterprise and mobile markets and making them cheap and reliable using its proprietary MSP technology (which stands for ‘Memory Signal Processing’). MSP lets Anobit engineer more reliable flash memory chips with significantly longer usable life.
Anobit’s list of clients isn’t public, but the Calcalist report claims Apple is a client:
