Intel, the maker of chips that run more than 90% of the world’s servers, has announced that it is buying Nervana Systems to broaden its role in data centers and the expanding Internet of Things.
The news comes amid a wave of AI-based acquisitions in the market as Apple announced it had acquired Turi earlier this week. The San Diego based Nervana Systems, which was founded 2 years ago, has specialized in combining hardware and software to help machines process data in ways similar to human brains, the companies said.
Intel plans to use Nervana’s expertise to better handle “deep learning” in the Internet cloud, Intel data center Group EVP Diane Bryant said in an online post.
While artificial intelligence is often equated with great science fiction, it isn’t relegated to novels and movies.
AI is all around us.
Naveen Rao, CEO and co-founder of Nervana commented on the deal:
With this deal, we can now shatter the old paradigm and move into a new regime of computing. We’ll look back in 10 years and see this time as the inflection point of when compute architectures became neural.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, though market sources indicate it was around the $350 million mark.