Intel Bets Big on Driverless Car Tech

The acquisition shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, since the two companies have been working together with BMW since past year to create a fully autonomous auto by 2021.

Intel just plunked down $15.3 billion for Mobileye, a leading manufacturer of sensors and cameras for autonomous cars, as it tries to catch up with microchip rivals Nvidia and Qualcomm in the driverless vehicle industry.

As a public company, Mobileye and Intel will have to make a formal announcement and attain shareholder approval if any deal is to go through.

“The combination is expected to 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”, it said.

“We expect the growth towards autonomous driving to be transformative”, Mobileye cofounder, president and ceo Ziv Aviram said. Beneath him, Intel SVP Doug Davis will oversee how Mobileye and Intel work together across the whole company.

The combined organization will be headquartered in Israel and led by Shashua.

Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford, said Intel’s $15.3-billion acquisition of Mobileye shows how the self-driving-car industry will be built on “frenemies”.

First they partnered, and now comes the acquisition: media in Israel are reporting that the computing giant Intel is acquiring Mobileye, a leader in autonomous driving technology, for up to $16 billion.

Mobileye develops computer vision, artificial intelligence and other advanced driver assistance systems for connected cars.

By acquiring Mobileye, Intel is expanding its portfolio with products as diverse as cameras, sensor chips, in-car networking and roadway mapping, as well as machine learning solutions.

Intel has agreed to buy the Israeli tech firm for $15.3 (14.3 billion euros) which could give it a dominant role in the autonomous-driving sector. In announcing the deal, the company said that its processors will dovetail nicely with Mobileye’s vision chips and 360-degree sensing technology in these “data centers on wheels”. Although it reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings in January, it said revenues this year would be flat. Intel has been working with Mobileye and BMW to get their own models on the road by the end of 2017.

Many of you have asked why we think autonomous cars and vehicles are so important to Intel’s future.