Deal worth $15.3 billion; Intel to move its automotive driving division to Israel- a major boost to Israel’s economy and standing as the high-tech and start-up center of the world
Intel Corp announced it is buying Israel’s Mobileye, the autonomous vehicle technology company, in the largest acquisition of an Israeli high-tech company to date.
The major deal, worth over $15 billion, is the latest massive acquisition of Israeli technology by foreign investors. Intel will also announce that it will be moving its automotive driving division to Israel sometime later this year to be managed by Mobileye’s CTO and co-founder, Amnon Shashua.
Mobileye and Intel have been working together since 2016 and Intel currently employs over 10,000 in its Israel branches.
Mobileye has been a world leading innovators of automotive technologies, including sensor fusion, advanced automobile camera tech, the Mobileye mono-camera, and mapping technologies. The company has been universally leading in driving safety with its Automatic Emergency Braking and Lane Keeping Intelligence.
It is best known for its Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS) and Full Autonomous Vehicles, the company working with Intel in collaboration with BMW since 2016 to produce and test the world’s first fully self-driving vehicles later this year. Mobileye is expected to deliver fully autonomous vehicles by 2021.
In a statement released by Intel CEO Brian Kraznich on the recent deal, he stated that the acquisition would lead to transformative “growth towards autonomous driving”, stating, “Intel provides critical foundational technologies for autonomous driving… Mobileye brings the industry’s best automotive-grade computer vision and strong momentum with automakers and suppliers,” and that “together, we can accelerate the future of autonomous driving with improved performance in a cloud-to-car solution at a lower cost for automakers. We expect the growth towards autonomous driving to be transformative. It will provide consumers with safer, more flexible, and less costly transportation options, and provide incremental business model opportunities for our automaker customers.”
He stated on the “pooling together” of both companies that capabilities that “we can enhance and accelerate our combined know-how in the areas of mapping, virtual driving, simulators, development tool chains, hardware, data centers and high-performance computing platforms. Together, we will provide an attractive value proposition for the automotive industry.”
Intel “estimates the vehicle systems, data and services market opportunity to be up to $70 billion by 2030.”
Mobileye was created in Jerusalem in 1999, its ADAS technology deployed in over 15 million vehicles to date. The deal is expected to be finalized in roughly nine months and will be a major boost to Israel’s economy with the deployment of Intel’s automotive driving division to Israel.
Photo: JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock.com
