Habana Labs
Israeli AI accelerator company founded 2016 by Avigdor Willenz and David Dahan. Acquired by Intel December 2019 for ~$2 billion. Became the foundation for Intel's Gaudi training accelerator line.
Habana Labs is an Israeli AI accelerator company founded in 2016 by Avigdor Willenz (also founder of Galileo Technology, Annapurna Labs, and chairman of Habana) and David Dahan. The company designed purpose-built deep-learning training and inference processors as alternatives to Nvidia GPUs.
Habana was acquired by Intel in December 2019 for approximately $2 billion in one of the largest Israeli semiconductor exits on record. Inside Intel, Habana became the foundation for the Gaudi training accelerator line (Gaudi, Gaudi2, Gaudi3). Intel positioned the Gaudi roadmap as its primary competitive response to Nvidia's data-center AI dominance through the early 2020s.
Habana's outcome — paired with Annapurna Labs (Amazon, 2015), Mellanox (Nvidia, 2019), and Run:ai (Nvidia, 2024) — defines the Israeli AI silicon and infrastructure exit pattern: category-defining Israeli teams absorbed by US hyperscalers and semiconductor primes.