Nervana has announced its planned acquisition by Intel, a move it says indicates that Intel is formally committing to pushing the forefront of AI technologies.
The acquisition was announced in a post on the Nervana website by Naveen Rao, CEO and co-founder of Nervana. “We’ll look back in 10 years and see this time as the inflection point of when compute architectures became neural," he wrote. "The semiconductor integrated circuit is one of humanity’s crowning achievements and Intel has the best semiconductor technology in the world. Nervana’s AI expertise combined with Intel’s capabilities and huge market reach will allow us to realize our vision and create something truly special.”
According to Rao, Nervana intends to continue all existing development efforts including the Nervana Neon deep learning framework, Nervana deep learning platform, and the Nervana Engine deep learning hardware. The combination of Nervana’s technology and expertise incorporated into Intel’s portfolio will take deep learning/AI solutions to the next level.
The company will continue to operate out of its San Diego headquarters.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but industry estimates placed it at more than $400 million.