Intel buying Mobileye for up to $16B to expand in self-driving tech

$16B is a great price for Mobileye&#x27;s team, but I am not sure it is the best move for Intel. But I guess Intel will try to sell package deals to car markers and thus use this to try to keep NVIDIA and ARM from locking up the in-car market.<p>Thus it is a strategic move on Intel&#x27;s part to fend off competitors rather than reflective of the intrinsic value of Mobileye.<p>BTW what was Mobileye&#x27;s revenue last year and profit margin? About $350M in 2016, with probably $500M in 2017 it seems. So the multiple is around 30x revenue or so?

I thought $16B for yet another autonomous car developer R&amp;D outfit seemed excessive even by Intel&#x27;s standards, but it looks as if Mobileye has been providing assistant&#x2F;enhancing technologies (eg collision warning systems) for more than a decade.<p>This is probably not too bad a spot to be in, at least until fully autonomous vehicles have become mainstream. They seem to be profitable, at least.

Mobileye was founded in 1999, a huge leap of faith to get into the self-driving technology back then.

Their plan is probably to build machine learning&#x2F;autonomous driving chips combining Intel&#x27;s own chips&#x2F;expertise, FPGA (as with their Altera acquisition) and specialist ML chips (like Movidius that they bought recently).<p>$16B for Mobilieye as a route to market (they already have the relationships and supply chains set up with car manufacturing) sounds like a lot but Intel needs a fast track if they want to compete with Nvidia (and ARM and Qualcomm) in that space.

This after Tesla dumped Mobileye, due to Mobileye&#x27;s inability to detect stopped vehicles partially blocking a lane. (3 known crashes, one fatality.)

What&#x27;s Intels play here? I&#x27;m glad the mobileye team get some nice purim bonus but we&#x27;ll see in couple of years if Intel won&#x27;t kill the product (and the team)...

My wife has Mobileye in her car - it works quite well - warning you when you&#x27;re too close to the car in front or when you&#x27;re wandering out of your lane.

Intel has made acquisitions of almost $40 billion in the past couple of years. It will be interesting to see if they can make this money back as competition becomes more fierce in the PC and server markets because of AMD and Qualcomm.

Yeah, they&#x27;re old school. They&#x27;ve got all sorts of deep industry partnerships and various driver assist and safety products. What they don&#x27;t have is a Level 4 autonomous driving OS. Nobody does, it doesn&#x27;t exist yet.<p>The whole 3 ring circus of chipmakers, OEM&#x27;s, and various component suppliers that stand to benefit from Autonomous vehicles is held aloft by a single tentpole that doesn&#x27;t actually exist yet. It&#x27;s just a twinkle in the eye of some AI genius who may very well still be an undergrad at the moment. Intel just spent 15 gigabucks assuaging their fear of missing out.<p>The field of AI and deep learning in particular is changing and progressing so fast that the experts of yesteryear are almost certainly not the people who will build the autonomous OS of the future. There will be a lot of misspent capital between now and the first safe, reliable, market ready, publicly accessible fully autonomous vehicle.

Intel has spent billions of dollars in M&amp;A and in R+D and still has missed ARM Holdings, just acquired by Softbank last summer.

I have to wonder what sort of market size projections support that kind of price for what is essentially an accessory technology. There&#x27;s a lot of fanciful fantasies about self driving cars floating around, but I&#x27;m not familiar with any of them that would support the idea of a growth market compared to today&#x27;s dumbcar market. Even today, you can buy entire car companies for that kind of money.

geohot&#x27;s gonna be all fired-up.

Another success story from the Israeli startups scene!

Picking up Tesla&#x27;s table scraps for $16B seems like a losing move.

I can only assume that Intel will axe some of the C-Suite and attempt to rekindle the flame with Tesla. Mobileye was functioning a bit too much like a traditional (and glacial) vendor in the automotive industry. Tesla wanted to develop and implemented quickly, while Mobileye became a bit too focus on the what-ifs.<p>The truth is, Tesla vehicles are safer than their counterparts in almost every situation imaginable. Mobileye screwed the pooch when they began issuing negative press releases that attempted to push all the responsibility and potential liability onto Tesla.<p>Intel is smarter than that. Intel has become fairly accustomed to implementing and following through with aggressive development and launch cycles.