Last month, Intel announced that it would acquire Israeli AI chip startup Habana Labs for $2B. At the time, I opined that this probably spelled the end for chips from the 2016 Nervana acquisition. Intel planned to bring out both the inference and the training versions of Nervana's second attempt to out-perform NVIDIA by the end of 2019. Apparently, something ugly happened on the way to the data center. Now, as expected, Intel has announced that Nervana will be no more.

Intel said it is ending work on its Nervana neural network processors in favor of the artificial intelligence chips it gained with the chipmaker's recent $2 billion acquisition of Habana Labs. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said Friday it has ended development of its Nervana NNP-T training chips and will deliver on current customer commitments for its Nervana NNP-I inference chips, so that it can move forward with Habana Labs' Gaudi and Goya processors in their place. "Habana product line offers the strong, strategic advantage of a unified, highly-programmable architecture for both inference and training," Intel said in a statement provided to CRN. "By moving to a single hardware architecture and software stack for data center AI acceleration, our engineering teams can join forces and focus on delivering more innovation, faster to our customers." Analysts questioned whether Intel would move forward with Nervana after the chipmaker announced its acquisition of Habana Labs in mid-December. The deal was only announced a little over a month after Intel in November revealed more details of its Nervana chips, which were meant to compete with Nvidia's growing footprint of GPUs in the AI acceleration market.

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.

Rumors are rife that Intel is in talks to acquire Israeli AI accelerator startup Habana Labs. Intel is reportedly considering a purchase price of ranging anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion, according to the Israeli publication Calcalist, who broke the story earlier this week. If it's true, it would be a surprising move, given that Habana competes with Intel acquisition Nervana. Nervana, based in San Diego, was purchased by Intel back in August of 2016 for a sum believed to be around $400 million. Intel acquired another AI chip startup, Movidius, the following month (Movidius' product line is aimed at computer vision in edge devices).

Every day, more than 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data is generated. With data being available at that a huge scale, we need systems that analyse the data faster, in order to provide real time responses. Quicker Analysis, Data compression, and storage are few of the most important aspects that companies are competing to optimize. Intel(INTC) announced its strategic, cross-Intel organisation – Artificial Intelligence Products Group(AIPG), post its acquisition of the firm Nervana. It is lead by the former CEO of Nervana, Naveen Rao.

Andrew Ng helped create two of Silicon Valley's leading artificial intelligence labs. First, he built Google Brain, now the hub of AI research inside the internet giant. Then he built a lab in the Valley for Baidu, the company known as the Google of China. Ng was one of the primary figures behind the enormous and rapid rise of AI over the last five years as everyone from Facebook to Microsoft rebuilt themselves around deep learning. And on Tuesday night, he announced his departure from Baidu.

Intel is the world's biggest maker of processors for computers, but it hasn't been the fastest when it comes to capitalizing on the artificial intelligence computing explosion. Rival Nvidia and other AI processor startups have jumped into the market, and Intel has been playing catchup. But the big company has been moving fast. It acquired AI chip design firm Nervana in 2016 for $350 million, and Intel recently announced that its Xeon CPUs generated $1 billion in revenue in 2017 for use in AI applications. Intel believes that the overall market for AI chips will reach between $8 billion and $10 billion in revenue by 2022. And the company is focused on designing AI chips from the ground up, according to Gadi Singer, vice president and general manager of AI architecture at Intel. Singer, his boss Naveen Rao, and chip architect Jim Keller have been hitting the road lately to show that Intel isn't asleep at the switch when it comes to the hot AI chip design trends.

Intel held a full day event last week to lay out its strategy and products for growth in the datacenter. Senior executives took the opportunity to talk about CPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, memory, and networking, while sprinkling in a healthy dose of real-world customer success stories. Investors were hoping that this event would shed some light on how the company plans to compete with NVIDIA for AI and with AMD for datacenter GPUs. In addition to a few product announcements, we learned more about the company's AI strategy (which I initially outlined here back in May after its inaugural AI DevCon event). My colleague Patrick Moorhead, President of Moor Insights & Strategy, covered the broader data center topics here in this blog, but here's my take on the AI side of things.

Intel has been on an artificial intelligence (AI) buying spree lately. On the heels of its Nervana, Mobileye, and Movidius acquisitions, it today announced that it's buying Vertex.ai, Vertex.ai will join the chipmaker's Artificial Intelligence Products Group, according to a note on its website, where it'll "support a variety of hardware" and work to integrate PlaidML, its "multi-language acceleration platform" that allows developers to deploy AI models on Linux, macOS, and Windows devices, with Intel's nGraph machine learning backend. It'll continue to develop the PlaidML, which is open source, under the Apache 2.0 license. "Intel has acquired Vertex.ai, a Seattle-based startup focused on deep learning compilation tools and associated technology," Intel said in a statement.

But finding the sweet spot where human and machine effortlessly collaborate has proved elusive. Arjun Bansal, a founder of the artificial intelligence company Nervana, believes that seamless man-machine collaboration is coming. But when it arrives and how it will work will vary by industry. Nervana, founded in 2014 and acquired by Intel in 2016, built a full-stack software-as-a-service platform to allow businesses to develop their own proprietary customized deep learning software. Bansal was one of three founders of Nervana and now heads up the AI and deep learning team at Intel.