Intel data center chief Diane Bryant, with Nervana co-founders Naveen Rao, Arjun Bansal, Amir Khosrowshaki and Intel vice president Jason Waxman (left to right)
Intel data center chief Diane Bryant, with Nervana co-founders Naveen Rao, Arjun Bansal, Amir Khosrowshaki and Intel vice president Jason Waxman (left to right)

SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — Chip giant Intel is buying deep learning startup Nervana Systems, hedging its bets in the anticipation that artificial intelligence will one day rule the roost inside corporate data centers.

The company hasn’t released an official amount, but sources have revealed Intel plans to pay nearly $410 million for the company, according to Recode.

Nervana currently carries a workforce of just 48 employees.

Intel vice president Jason Waxman said the shift toward artificial intelligence could trump the move towards cloud computing, according to Recode’s report. Machine learning, he said, is needed far more as society evolves from a world in which people control just a handful of devices that are connected to the internet, to one in which billions are connected and interacting with each other.

“There is far more data being given off by these machines than people can possibly sift through,” Waxman said.

Nervana’s approach is one a company like Intel is quite familiar with — the company has been working to bring machine learning into silicon, rather than simply making software that can run on top of anyone’s cluster of graphics chips.

Led by former Qualcomm researcher Naveen Rao, the company has raised $25 million in venture capital, and also has a contract to work with In-Q-tel, the U.S. intelligence community’s venture arm. Rao said that the deal didn’t reflect any hurdles in getting more capital to stay independent.

“Raising money was not the problem,” he said. “That was going to be relatively easy.” But by selling to Intel, he said, “we have access to technology we’d never dream about.”

As far as data centers go, Intel has dominated that spectrum for years — Intel chips hold an almost monopoly-like presence in data centers worldwide.

That’s in contrast to the mobile world, where the company is investing big in internet-of-things efforts after having essentially missed out on the smartphone revolution.

“There’s always a next wave,” Waxman said, noting that corporate computing has already gone from mainframes to client-server and now on to cloud computing. “I firmly believe this is not only the next wave but something that will dwarf the last wave.”