Annapurna Labs
Israeli chip-design company founded 2011 by Avigdor Willenz and Nafea Bshara. Acquired by AWS in 2015 for ~$370M. Became the engineering core of AWS Graviton ARM processors, the Nitro System, and Trainium/Inferentia AI accelerators.
Annapurna Labs is an Israeli chip-design company founded in 2011 by Avigdor Willenz and Nafea Bshara. The company designed custom silicon for cloud and networking workloads, focused on ARM-based processors for data-center applications.
Annapurna was acquired by Amazon Web Services in January 2015 for a reported $370 million. The acquisition is now widely regarded as one of the highest-return purchases in cloud infrastructure history: Annapurna's team and intellectual property became the engineering core of the AWS Graviton ARM server processor line, the AWS Nitro System hypervisor offload chips, and the Trainium and Inferentia AI accelerators.
By 2024, the silicon designed by Annapurna inside AWS powered a majority of new AWS compute instances launched, and Graviton became the most-deployed cloud ARM server in the world. The exit is the canonical case study in Israeli chip-design teams becoming the silicon backbone of a US hyperscaler.