Intel grabs computer vision expert Mobileye
With its smart cameras and mapping solutions for driver assistance systems, Mobileye has a strong market position throughout the automotive industry, either selling directly to OEMs or indirectly through cooperations with tier one suppliers like Bosch. Mobileye, headquartered in Jerusalem, employs some 600 workers.
According to Intel, the move will accelerate innovation for the automotive industry and position Intel as a leading technology provider in the fast-growing market for highly and fully autonomous vehicles. Intel estimates the vehicle systems, data and services market opportunity to be up to $70 billion by 2030. This transaction extends Intel’s strategy to invest in data-intensive market opportunities that build on the company’s strengths in computing and connectivity from the cloud, through the network, to the device. It is planned to merge Intel’s Automated driving Group with Mobileye to form a global driving organization, based in Israel and led by Mobileye co-founder and chairman Amnon Shashua.
As cars progress from assisted driving to fully autonomous, they are increasingly becoming data centers on wheels. Intel expects that by 2020, autonomous vehicles will generate 4,000 GB of data per day, which plays to Intel’s strengths in high-performance computing and network connectivity. The complexity and computing power of highly and fully autonomous cars creates large-scale opportunities for high-end Intel Xeon processors and high-performance EyeQ4 and EyeQ5 SoCs, high-performance FPGAs, memory, high-bandwidth connectivity, and computer vision technology.
Intel has offered an acquisition price of about 14 billion euros, almost one third higher than Mobileye’s valuation at the stock exchange per last Friday. The transaction is expected to close within nine months.
In the past, the American computer chip giant was struggling to get a foot into the automotive market. This changed when Intel signed a collaboration agreement with BMW and Mobileye past year to jointly develop the technology needed for automated driving. At the time of the agreement, many observers questioned about Intel’s role in this trio. Now they know.
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