Intel has joined the race to develop driverless cars this week as the company has announced the acquisition of Mobileye for £15 billion.
Mobileye is a specialist in computer vision, machine learning and mapping for driverless car systems. The Israeli-based company develops proprietary chips and software that interprets data to anticipate possible collisions with other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists, animals, debris and other obstacles.
‘We expect the growth towards autonomous driving to be transformative. It will provide consumers with safer, more flexible, and less costly transportation options, and provide incremental business model opportunities for our automaker customers,’ said Mr Ziv Aviram, Mobileye co-founder, president, and CEO.
This is a clear sign that Intel intends to try and grab a piece of the autonomous vehicle market which Intel has valued at approximately $70 billion by 2030.
While Intel is acquiring Mobileye the resulting conglomeration of the company’s technologies and staff - The combined global autonomous driving organization - will be headquartered in Israel and led by Professor Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s co-founder, chairman, and CTO.
The organisation will support both companies’ existing production programs and build upon relationships with automotive OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and semiconductor partners to develop advanced driving assist, highly autonomous and fully autonomous driving programs. Intel Senior Vice President Doug Davis will oversee the combined organization’s engagement across Intel’s business groups and will report to Professor Shashua.
‘By pooling together our infrastructure and resources, we can enhance and accelerate our combined know-how in the areas of mapping, virtual driving, simulators, development tool chains, hardware, data centers and high-performance computing platforms. Together, we will provide an attractive value proposition for the automotive industry’ said Aviram.
Once the agreement has been completed, it is expected that a subsidiary of Intel will commence a tender offer to acquire all of the issued and outstanding ordinary shares of Mobileye for $63.54 per share in cash, representing an equity value of approximately $15.3 billion and an enterprise value of $14.7 billion.
