Habana Labs

Habana Labs was founded in 2016 by Avigdor Willenz and Uria Shani. The company develops purpose-built processors (chips) for AI training and inference workloads. In 2019, Intel acquired Habana Labs for approximately $2 billion — one of the largest acquisitions of an Israeli chip company at the time. Habana Labs now operates as a division within Intel.

The company designs dedicated hardware accelerators for deep learning workloads. Its two main product lines are Gaudi — for model training — and Goya — for inference. Customers are cloud providers and large data centers seeking an alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI compute.

The Goya processor was the company's first product, designed for inference in data center environments. The Gaudi processor targets deep learning training and is positioned as a direct competitor to NVIDIA's A100. Later generations — Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 — were developed under Intel's ownership.

NVIDIA is the dominant competitor in AI accelerators, holding a commanding market share. Other competitors include Google (TPU) and AMD (Instinct series). Habana Labs is positioned as a lower total-cost-of-ownership alternative to NVIDIA accelerators in cloud environments.

Habana Labs was founded in Israel and maintains its core technical center in Tel Aviv. The bulk of R&D — covering chip architecture, software (drivers, compiler, and SDK), and integration with frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow — is carried out in Israel.