Habana Labs
Israeli AI accelerator startup (founded 2016 by Avigdor Willenz, David Dahan, Ran Halutz), acquired by Intel in December 2019 for ~$2 billion and folded into Intel's Gaudi training-chip line. By 2025, Intel had scrapped Gaudi's planned successor (Falcon Shores) and effectively shut the unit down; nearly all founders and staff left, and the founders relaunched as Element Labs in Habana's former Caesarea offices.
Habana Labs was an Israeli AI accelerator company founded in 2016 by Avigdor Willenz (also founder of Galileo Technology and Annapurna Labs), David Dahan and Ran Halutz. Intel acquired Habana in December 2019 for approximately $2 billion, one of the largest Israeli semiconductor exits on record, but by 2025 the unit had effectively been shut down inside Intel, and its founders have since launched a new AI chip venture, Element Labs, in the same Caesarea offices Habana vacated.
What Did Habana Build, and Why Did Intel Buy It?
Habana designed purpose-built deep-learning training and inference processors as alternatives to Nvidia GPUs. Intel bought the company in December 2019 specifically to challenge Nvidia's dominance in AI acceleration, having lost out to Nvidia in a prior bid for Mellanox Technologies. Inside Intel, Habana's technology became the foundation for the Gaudi training accelerator line: Gaudi, Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3.
Why Did Intel's Gaudi Strategy Fail?
Intel set a goal of $500 million in AI accelerator revenue and, at one point, projected $25 billion in AI processor revenue by 2024; neither target was reached. Gaudi 1 and Gaudi 2 struggled to gain market traction against Nvidia, and in 2025 Intel decided not to commercially market Falcon Shores, the combined CPU-GPU platform that was meant to be Gaudi's successor, after the chip received negative customer feedback. That decision effectively ended Habana's life as a distinct product line within Intel.
What Happened to the Habana Labs Team?
Nearly all of Habana's founders, managers and engineers left Intel by the end of their four-year retention periods. Intel vacated Habana's roughly 8,000-square-meter Caesarea offices, dispersing the few hundred remaining employees across its Haifa and Petah Tikva development centers. Avigdor Willenz, David Dahan and Ran Halutz subsequently founded a new company, Element Labs, moving back into the same Caesarea offices to develop AI processors optimized for inference, the deployment stage where trained models perform real-world tasks such as image recognition and natural language processing.
What Is Intel's AI Chip Strategy Now?
Intel's current AI accelerator bet is Crescent Island, a data-center GPU built on the Xe3 architecture and aimed at inference rather than training, using air cooling and LPDDR5X memory to offer up to 480 GB of capacity at lower cost than rival designs. Crescent Island was originally expected to launch in the second half of 2026, though reporting suggests commercial rollout may slip into 2027. Habana's outcome, paired with Annapurna Labs (sold to Amazon, 2015), Mellanox (sold to Nvidia, 2019), and Run:ai (sold to Nvidia, 2024), still illustrates the broader Israeli AI silicon and infrastructure exit pattern, category-defining Israeli teams absorbed by US hyperscalers and semiconductor primes, even though the Habana deal itself ultimately failed to deliver Intel the Nvidia-rivaling product line it was acquired for.