U.S. chip firm Astera Labs announced on Monday that it is opening advanced research and development centers in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Semiconductor industry veteran Guy Azrad, senior vice president of engineering and general manager of Astera Labs Israel, will lead the new Israel operations, and will be supported by Ido Bukspan as vice president of ASIC Engineering, the U.S. company said in a statement.
“With offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa, the new Israel design center will look to tap into the region’s world-class engineering talent to focus on the full chip design flow—from architecture through production, including software and system design for cutting-edge AI fabrics and emerging inference applications,” Azrad was quoted by Astera Labs as saying.
“We’re building an engineering team with a strong focus on execution, covering hardware, silicon, and software solutions, to support the growing adoption of Astera Labs’ Intelligent Connectivity Platform,” he added.
Azrad recently served as vice president of chip design engineering at Google, where he led silicon development for compute applications.
Through collaborations with leading Israeli universities and the venture ecosystem, the design center is expected to serve as a hub to advance technologies critical to support next-generation AI infrastructure worldwide, the U.S. firm stated.
Astera Labs, currently traded on Nasdaq with a market cap of $28 billion, is entering the Israeli market in the footsteps of Nvidia, which announced in December its plans to establish a mega-campus in the Jewish state, set to become the tech giant’s second-largest after its Silicon Valley headquarters.
Unlike companies such as Amazon and Apple that acquired local Israeli companies before entering the market, Astera Labs is hiring the hardware engineers of Pliops, an Israeli data center storage chip company, according to Israeli financial outlet Globes.
About 60 Pliops engineers, comprising half of the company’s employees, will move to Astera Labs, in a deal worth around $70 million, the report continued.
Pliops was valued at $650 million in 2022, according to Globes.
Bukspan was the CEO of Pliops and prior to that served as vice president of chip development at Nvidia Israel.
