Chips and processors manufacturer Intel is selling 35 million Class A common stock shares, or approximately $1.5 billion stake, in Mobileye, a self-driving tech developer. Plus, Intel has also unveiled new graphics processing units (GPUs), the Intel Arc Pro A60 and Pro A60M.
$1.5 billion stake being sold
According to a news story on Reuters, Intel is currently selling 35 million shares worth around $1.5 billion in Mobileye via a secondary public offering, according to Monday’s regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mobileye, doing business as Mobileye Global Inc., is an Israel-based company that develops self-driving technologies and advanced driver-assistance systems. These comprise computer chips, software, and cameras.
The company has one of the most extensive fleets of self-driving vehicles in testing worldwide, including in New York City, Munich in Germany, Tokyo in Japan, and Paris in France. Some of its clients are Volkswagen, Nissan, and BMW. To date, over 140 million vehicles across the globe have been built using technologies from Mobileye.
It was in 1999 when Mobileye was founded to lower vehicle-related injuries and fatalities. In 2007, the self-driving tech developer received a $130 million investment from Goldman Sachs. In 2014, it listed shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
Intel has been the parent company of Mobileye. Intel acquired Mobileye in 2017 for more than $15 billion.
This sale came after the self-driving tech developer debuted on Wall Street last October, raising some $860 million in an initial public offering that valued this Intel unit at more than $21 billion. Since this IPO, Mobileye shares have more than doubled, giving it a market cap of nearly $34 billion.
With this sale, Intel is expecting its finances to boost further and to be able to keep up with the intensifying artificial intelligence (AI) race.
Intel’s new GPUs
Yesterday, Intel introduced new members of its Arc Pro A-series GPUs, namely the Intel Arc Pro A60 and Pro A60M. These GPUs are carefully designed for professional workstation users with up to 12GB video memory, and to support four displays with high dynamic range and Dolby Vision.
“With built-in ray tracing hardware, graphics acceleration and machine learning capabilities, the Intel Arc Pro A60 GPU unites fluid viewports, the latest in visual technologies and rich content creation in a traditional single slot factor,” Intel said.
Compared to its current Intel Arc Pro products, these GPUs offer double the number of PCIe lanes with 16, double the dedicated AI Xe Matrix Extensions engines with 256, double the number of ray tracing units with 16, and double the memory bandwidth at 384 gigabytes per second.
These features, along with full media encode and decode support, make these GPUs perfect for computer-assisted design and modeling, AI inference tasks, and media processing in dedicated enterprise environments.
