US semiconductor manufacturer plans to hire hundreds of employees to help build solutions for AI infrastructure challenges
US-based semiconductor company Astera Labs on Monday announced the opening a new R&D hub in Israel to develop and ramp up high-performance connectivity technologies that meet the fast-evolving challenges of artificial intelligence-based infrastructure.
The Santa Clara, California-based firm has hired office space in Tel Aviv and Haifa for its two R&D centers and is planning to hire hundreds of employees by the end of 2027. Google veteran Guy Azrad will oversee Astera’s operations in Israel.
“It is amazing and a bold move that after the war and the situation in Israel, a global company like Astera is coming and opening a strategic site here,” Azrad, senior vice president of engineering and general manager of Astera Labs Israel, told The Times of Israel. “Astera believes in the talent and the ecosystem in Israel, and we want to produce chips made in Israel.”
“With offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa, the new Israel center will look to tap into the 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,” he added.
Founded in 2018 by Texas Instruments veterans Jitendra Mohan, Sanjay Gajendra and Casey Morrison, Astera is a developer of connectivity solutions to ensure data moves seamlessly within AI and cloud infrastructures. Among its founding investors is Israeli serial tech entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz.
The firm initially developed hardware for a chip that allows high-speed connections between different parts of the server or compute platform to help remove bottlenecks throughout data centers. The chips amplify and clarify data signals transmitted over high-speed server connections.
With advances in compute-intensive and memory-heavy AI models and the surge in demand for generative AI workloads, Astera has been shifting its focus to offerings that enable and improve connectivity and communication across hundreds of accelerators operating as a unified system within the AI infrastructure in data centers.
Azrad said that the R&D hub in Israel will focus on the development of Astera’s next-generation fabrics for high-bandwidth connectivity, while also advancing technical research and development to address memory bottlenecks in AI training and other applications.
The R&D site in Israel will collaborate with local universities and the venture ecosystem to develop advanced connectivity solutions that aim to solve critical data, network and memory bottlenecks needed to support next-generation AI infrastructure worldwide, the firm said.
The Nasdaq-listed semiconductor company has a market value of almost $30 billion and employs more than 700 people worldwide.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/astera-labs-opens-israel-rd-hub-to-tap-into-local-talent-develop-ai-connectivity-tech/amp/
