Willenzs Element Labs replaces Habana Labs in Caesarea offices

Six years after Intel acquired Israeli chip developer Habana Labs for $2 billion, the US chip giant is vacating Habana’s 8,000 square meters of office space in Caesarea and dispersing the several hundred remaining employees to its development centers in Haifa and Petah Tikva.

Intel informed employees of this step six months ago. “Globes” has learned that Element Labs has leased the space – a new startup established by the founders of Habana Labs – Avigdor Willenz, David Dahan and Ran Halutz.

Before its acquisition by Intel, Habana Labs operated in the Granite Campus building in the Caesarea Business Park in 2,000 square meters of office space. After the acquisition by Intel, the lease in the building was extended for five years, with an option for a further five years, and expanded to 8,000 square meters.

During this period, Intel marketed Habana Labs Gaudi chip as a rival to Nvidia’s graphics processor, but failed to capture a significant market share, and Habana Labs executives left the company. Ultimately, Intel dissolved Habana as an independent unit and implemented its technology in a chip developed simultaneously in the US.

According to estimates, Element Labs will pay NIS 80 per square meter for the office space, not including property taxes and management fees, so the total annual rent is expected to be close to NIS 8 million. The company has about 200 employees and renting the building provides space for growth.

Financing round led by US insurance giant

Habana’s founders – Willenz, Dahan and Halutz – established Element Labs last year in Tel Aviv to develop an AI chip for inference. This is the operating phase of AI models after their training phase, which is supposed to be efficient and cheap to operate.

Element Labs seeks to develop its own inference processors that can divide the work between large data centers at remote sites and much smaller local data processing stations in neighborhoods and near residential and business centers. As previously revealed by “Globes,” the processors will be developed according to customer requirements.

Element Labs raised $50 million at a valuation of about $500 million earlier this year, led by US insurance giant Fidelity and the Atreides private equity fund, which has previously invested in Willenz’s startups. Willenz also served as Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s partner in investments in Israel, including in Habana Labs.

Intel said, “As we announced earlier this year, we are taking steps to become a leaner, faster, and more efficient company. We made these decisions after careful consideration of the steps needed to position our business for the future.”