Intel acquires AI chipmaker Habana Labs in $2 billion deal

Intel's Habana acquisition intended to accelerate its efforts in the AI chip market

Intel is to acquire Israel-based artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker Habana Labs for approximately $2 billion.

Intel expects the acquisition to help strengthen its AI portfolio and to also speed up "its efforts in the nascent, fast-growing AI silicon market", which is expected to exceed $25 billion in value by 2024.

"This acquisition advances our AI strategy, which is to provide customers with solutions to fit every performance need - from the intelligent edge to the data centre," said Navin Shenoy, general manager of the Data Platforms Group at Intel.

"More specifically, Habana turbo-charges our AI offerings for the data centre with a high-performance training processor family and a standards-based programming environment to address evolving AI workloads," he added.

Intel expects to generate more than $3.5 billion in "AI-driven revenue" in 2019, an increase of 20 per cent from last year.

Habana is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, and specialises in making programmable deep learning accelerators. The company optimises its AI chips for the specific needs of training deep neural networks and for inference deployment in production environments. Since its founding in 2016, Habana has raised approximately $120 million in funding. In addition to Tel Aviv, the company also has offices in San Jose, Beijing and Gdansk, Poland.

In June, Habana launched its new Gaudi AI processor, which it claimed is capable of delivering up to 4x the throughput of systems with equivalent number of GPUs.

The Israeli start-up will continue to remain an independent unit following the completion of the deal. It will be led by its current management team, which will then report to Intel's data platforms group. Habana's Chairman Avigdor Willenz will also serve as a senior adviser to Intel.

The deal with Habana follows a series of AI-related investments by Intel in recent years, including Nervana, Movidius, Mobileye and Altera.

After buying Mobileye in 2017, Intel shifted its automotive technologies headquarters to Jerusalem. The company earlier announced that it planned to invest about $11 billion to expand its local chip factory.

In August, Intel unveiled its first artificial intelligence chip, named 'Spring Hill' or Nervana NNP-I 1000, based on a 10nm Ice Lake processor and intended for large computing centres.

While unveiling Nevana NNP-I, Intel said that the chip arose from its $120 million investment in three Israeli AI start-ups, including NeuroBlade and Habana Labs.