Intel Stops Nervana Development, Shifts Focus to Habana

In a tweet on Friday, deep learning analyst Karl Freund announced that Intel would "close the door" on Nervana, the deep learning chip startup Intel acquired in 2016, and instead focus on Habana Labs, the other startup that Intel acquired in December for almost $2 billion. Intel informed Freund of its new AI strategy going forward. Intel will support the NNP-I inference chip "for previously committed customers," but says that it will completely cease development of the NNP-T AI training design. Intel stopping development of the NNP-T doesn't come as a complete surprise, given the acquisition of Habana in December: both companies make chips targeted at artificial intelligence workloads in the data center (deep neural networks). At the time of the acquisition, there was already much speculation about what this implied for Nervana.