Intel continues love affair with Israeli tech: pays $2 billion for Habana Labs

Global chip giant Intel Corp has just concluded its second largest acquisition in Israel, buying Habana Labs for around $2 billion. In 2017, it bought Mobileye for $15.3 billion.

Habana Labs develops programmable deep learning accelerators for the data center. Intel Capital was previously an investor in Habana Labs.

The U.S. technology giant said the acquisition “strengthens Intel’s artificial intelligence (AI) portfolio and accelerates its efforts in the nascent, fast-growing AI silicon market, which Intel expects to be greater than $25 billion by 2024.”

Intel's Data Platforms Group executive vice president and general manager Navin Shenoy said: “Habana turbo-charges our AI offerings for the data center with a high-performance training processor family and a standards-based programming environment to address evolving AI workloads.”

Intel expects to have generated more than $3.5 billion in AI-led revenue in 2019, which would be a significant rise on the previous year with an increase of in excess of 20 percent on the year.

According to reports, Habana, whose offices are located in Caesarea, will continue to operate in Israel as an independent business unit by its management team. Habana Chairman Avigdor Willenz will be a senior adviser to the business unit and also to Intel and the firm will report to Intel’s Data Platforms Group.

Intel, employs almost 13,000 people in Israel, and is by far the biggest foreign corporate investor in Israel, having invested in scores of Israeli companies.