- Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) announced it is buying SigOpt. These are the details.
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) announced it is buying SigOpt — which is a San Francisco-based provider of a leading platform for the optimization of artificial intelligence (AI) software models at scale. SigOpt’s AI software technologies are known for delivering productivity and performance gains across hardware and software parameters, use cases and workloads in deep learning, machine learning and data analytics. And Intel plans to use SigOpt’s software technologies across Intel’s AI hardware products to help accelerate, amplify and scale Intel’s AI software solution offerings to developers.
SigOpt’s customer base includes Fortune 500 companies across industries as well as leading research institutions, universities, and consortiums. And SigOpt’s software technologies will continue to be available to data scientists and developers to enable better productivity and performance in solving real-life use cases and drive business value for customers.
Intel’s AI strategy is grounded in a belief in the power of AI to improve business outcomes. And it requires a broad mix of technologies – hardware and software – and full ecosystem support.
Intel is expecting the AI silicon market to be greater than $25 billion by 2024. And AI solutions already drive meaningful revenue for the company with more than $3.8 billion in AI-driven revenue in 2019.
The combination of SigOpt’s software technologies and Intel hardware is expected to drive increased AI adoption. And Intel’s AI software strategy is aimed at optimizing Intel’s hardware performance, providing tools to speed up the AI workflow process and building a consistent experience for developers with oneAPI.
SigOpt CEO and co-founder Scott Clark and CTO and co-founder Patrick Hayes will join the Machine Learning Performance team at Intel. And they bring desired technical talent to help solve some of the biggest challenges faced by Intel’s customers.
The deal is expected to close this quarter. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.
KEY QUOTES:
“In the new intelligence era, AI is driving the compute needs of the future. It is even more important for software to automatically extract the best compute performance while scaling AI models. SigOpt’s AI software platform and data science talent will augment Intel software, architecture, product offerings and teams, and provide us with valuable customer insights. We welcome the SigOpt team and its customers to the Intel family.”
– Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president, chief architect and general manager of Architecture, Graphics and Software (IAGS)
“We are excited to join Intel and supercharge our mission to accelerate and amplify the impact of modelers everywhere. By combining our AI optimization software with Intel’s decades-long leadership in AI computing and machine learning performance, we will be able to unlock entirely new AI capabilities for modelers.”
– Scott Clark, SigOpt CEO and co-founder
