Habana Labs’ founders leave Intel to form AI startup
David Dahan and Ran Halutz, co-founders at Habana Labs, have left the Intel company to start another AI company called Touch in Tel Aviv, Israel, according to reports.
In doing so they are joining up with previous colleague and highly successful entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz, who is listed as chairman of the startup.
Willenz has had a string of successes starting with the sale of Gallileo to Marvell for US$2.7 billion in 2000 followed by the sale of Annapurna Labs to Amazon for US$360 million in 2015 and the sale of Habana Labs to Intel for US$2 billion in 2019. Willenz was also founding investor at Astera Labs which staged an IPO in 2024
Willenz, Dahan and Halutz registered their company in August under the name Element Labs and are self-funded with the support of an angel investor Manuel Alba who also invested in Annapurna, according to Globes publication.
Intel CPU architects leave to form RISC-V startup
Intel launched two Habana-developed processors – Gaudi 1 and Gaudi 2 – but was unable to take market share from market leader Nvidia. Gaudi 3 is due to launch in 2024 but the roadmap does not continue with the GPU core of Gaudi 3 being merged into Intel’s Falcon Shores HPC processor due on the Intel 18A process in 2025.
It is speculated that the company is working on inference processors optimized to work not in large datacenters but in smaller enterprise and locality server farms.
Related links and articles:
Flow Computing raises €4 million to boost CPU AI
Lip-Bu Tan quit Intel board after ‘differences’ with CEO, says Reuters
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