Why Intel Acquired Habana

Intel Corporation this week announced that it has acquired Habana Labs for approximately $2 billion. Habana is an Israel-based company that develops programmable deep learning accelerators for the data centre. This acquisition is aimed at strengthening Intel's artificial intelligence portfolio and accelerate its efforts in the AI silicon market, which Intel expects to be greater than $25 billion 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, executive VP at Intel, in a press release. In July, Habana announced its Gaudi AI training processor, which the Tel Aviv startup promised was capable of beating GPU-based systems by 4x.