Intel is employing hundreds to develop AI chips in Israel

The world’s tech giants are expanding and employing more and more developers in the arms race for data center chips. Intel’s AI chip development group, based on its $ 2 billion acquisition of the Israeli startup Habana Labs in December 2019, and Nervana Systems, announced that it is employing 400 developers, most of them in Israel but also in the United States, Poland and India. The announcement comes just three weeks after Nvidia announced that it would hire 600 chip developers in Israel. Artificial intelligence chips are one of the most important components of the future internet infrastructure, as smart and autonomous components will enable smart cities to connect everything through G5 fiber optic networks. Since Intel acquired Habana Labs, the company’s workforce has already grown from 180 to 800. After the recent expansion, the number of employees at Habana Labs will exceed the threshold of 1,000. At the beginning of 2021, Intel Israel had 13,950 employees including 7,000 in development centers , 4,850 in production plants and 2,100 in Mobileye, Moveit and Habana Laboratories. Eitan Medina, Habana Labs chief business officer, told “Globes” that the company employs nearly 400 people and is expanding rapidly. “We are working on expanding our physical infrastructure and moving to a new three-story building in Caesarea and a new three-story site in Tel Aviv. All this mainly so that we can accelerate the development of programs in everything related to urgent support for artificial intelligence, infrastructures, models and support of all kinds.” Software packages and of course the continuation of the processors that we are strongly advancing with. ” Habana Labs was founded by Avigdor Wellens, founder of the Galileo chip maker, which sold to Marvel in 2000 for $ 2.7 billion. He went on to establish Annapurna Labs, which was sold to Amazon in 2015 for $ 370 million, as Amazon today is developing its own AI chips for data centers. At the end of 2020, Intel and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a strategic partnership on AI chips. Habana chips are said to have 40% better performance than Nividia’s AI chips, Intel’s main competitor in this segment. Medina said: “AWS controls more than half of the global AI market in the cloud. It is significantly larger and larger. This is a very important opportunity for Intel and Habana Labs AI processors.” Habana Labs is at the forefront of Intel’s effort to produce AI chips for data centers. Intel is competing in this sector against five cloud computing giants – Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. These huge data centers are quickly replacing the smaller servers in the smaller data centers within companies. Habana’s aren’t relying on their laurels with Gaudi and Goya chips and performing dozens of percentage points better than their competitors. Medina said, “While the Gaudi and Goya processors that we launched and deployed in our data centers are already in 16nm, we are already working hard on the 7nm version that will be ready soon.” Medina reports that Intel-Habana has “achieved a commercial advance, an expansion of the ecosystem, and a continuous expansion of its research activities, especially in Israel.” Related articles Israel considered a major player as global chip war intensifies Intel buys Israeli AI chips Habana for $ 2 billion. The fact that even in 16nm production, Intel-Habana processors have a performance advantage over Nvidia, Medina said, “shows the architectural advantage. Even with the 16nm Gaudi processor, Amazon announced that it improves the cost-performance ratio in a relatively important way to the processor.” The new 7nm GPU, so you can imagine our second generation, produced up to 7nm, would be very attractive. We didn’t release dates but this will happen soon. ”Habana chips are not only designed for data center servers but also for private cloud servers. Here the competition among chip companies is about standing with giants that are proud of their collaborations with research institutes and companies hiring AI developers. So Intel, for example, recently announced its collaboration with the SDSC supercomputer in San Diego, where it will provide 336 Gaudi processors and 16 Goya processors to build the Voyager supercomputer. Posted by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on April 19, 2021 © Copyright Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2021