Intel to Acquire SigOpt to Scale AI Productivity and Performance

What’s New: Today, Intel announced it will acquire SigOpt, a San Francisco-based provider of a leading platform for the optimization of artificial intelligence (AI) software models at scale. SigOpt’s AI software technologies deliver productivity and performance gains across hardware and software parameters, use cases and workloads in deep learning, machine learning and data analytics. Intel plans to use SigOpt’s software technologies across Intel’s AI hardware products to help accelerate, amplify and scale Intel’s AI software solution offerings to developers.

“In the new intelligence era, AI is driving the compute needs of the future. It is even more important for software to automatically extract the best compute performance while scaling AI models. SigOpt’s AI software platform and data science talent will augment Intel software, architecture, product offerings and teams, and provide us with valuable customer insights. We welcome the SigOpt team and its customers to the Intel family.”
– Raja Koduri, Intel senior vice president, chief architect and general manager of Architecture, Graphics and Software (IAGS)

Why It Matters: SigOpt’s software technologies combined with Intel hardware provide competitive advantages and differentiated value for data scientists and developers, and they complement Intel’s existing AI software portfolio.

SigOpt CEO and co-founder Scott Clark (left) and CTO and co-founder Patrick Hayes will join the Machine Learning Performance team at Intel. (Credit: SigOpt)

“We are excited to join Intel and supercharge our mission to accelerate and amplify the impact of modelers everywhere,” said Scott Clark, SigOpt CEO and co-founder. “By combining our AI optimization software with Intel’s decades-long leadership in AI computing and machine learning performance, we will be able to unlock entirely new AI capabilities for modelers.”

The Details: The deal is expected to close this quarter. Transaction terms were not disclosed. SigOpt’s team – including Clark and CTO and co-founder Patrick Hayes – will join the Machine Learning Performance team in IAGS. They bring highly desired technical talent to help solve some of the biggest challenges faced by Intel’s customers.

SigOpt’s customer base includes Fortune 500 companies across industries, as well as leading research institutions, universities and consortiums. SigOpt’s software technologies will continue to be available to data scientists and developers to enable better productivity and performance in solving real-life use cases and drive business value for customers.

About Intel’s AI Strategy: Intel’s AI strategy is grounded in a belief in the power of AI to improve business outcomes. It requires a broad mix of technologies – hardware and software – and full ecosystem support. Intel expects the AI silicon market to be greater than $25 billion by 2024¹. AI solutions already drive meaningful revenue for the company with more than $3.8 billion in AI-driven revenue in 2019. The combination of SigOpt’s software technologies and Intel hardware is expected to drive increased AI adoption. Intel’s AI software strategy is aimed at optimizing Intel’s hardware performance, providing tools to speed up the AI workflow process and building a consistent experience for developers with oneAPI.

¹Intel estimates the total addressable market (TAM) for AI silicon by 2024 will be greater than $25 billion, and within that, AI silicon in the data center is expected to be greater than $10 billion in the same timeframe.

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