Intel Buys Out AI Startup Habana Labs

Well, here is some interesting M+A activity a week ahead of Christmas... Intel just announced they are acquiring AI chipmaker start-up Habana Labs.

Habana Labs is the company that has been developing their Gaudi AI processor for AI training and Goya AI processor for inference. The Habana Labs hardware has been extremely promising and showing off extremely competitive performance compared to other accelerators for AI workloads.

Intel announced they are acquiring this Israel-based company for around $2 billion USD in order to strengthen Intel's artificial intelligence capabilities.

We have enjoyed following Habana Labs' progress as they are open-source driver friendly and have been punctual in getting their Linux driver support into the mainline kernel, etc. Considering Intel's open-source driver track record, we have no reason to doubt that they will continue providing Habana Labs open-source driver support and ideally embrace open-source even more... Habana Labs accelerators can also fit nicely into Intel's oneAPI approach.