Amazon’s cloud division, AWS, and in particular some senior Israelis in it, including Nafe Bashara, has a large contribution to the deal of hundreds ofmillions that was announced today (Thursday) between the Israeli Banias and the British Alphawave, Globes learned. This morning the Alpha Wave company, which develops intellectual property for signal processing chips (DSP), announced the purchase of the Israeli Banias Labs, an unknown company that developed an optical signal processing chip, in exchange for 240 million dollars. Behind the purchase is the intention to speed up the signal processing process in analog components in server farms – a gap experienced by cloud giants such as Amazon and Google.
Globes has learned that Amazon AWS had a hand and foot not only in the purchase deal, as a bridesmaid, but that its executives were an inspiration for its founders during the founding of the company. Before the eyes of Nape Bashara, an Israeli who lives in the USA and serves as Amazon’s senior engineer in the field of server chips, was the intention to fill gaps in signal processing in analog components in server farms, where chips manufactured by Anforna, the chip company founded by Nape and sold to Amazon in the previous decade, are currently embedded .
Banias Labs was founded by Bashara’s former partner, Avigdor Vilanz, alongside three employees of the development center of the Chinese company Huawei in Israel, Toga Networks: Amnon Rom, Amri Levy and Or Vidal. Banias has maintained a low media profile since its establishment in 2020 and according to the assessment, they have not yet launched a working chip, but have entered the “tape out” phase, i.e. developing a prototype of a chip before it goes into production. The company hoped for a higher amount, but “settled”, as mentioned, with only 240 million dollars, partly due to the low values for private companies in the technology market.
Avigdor Vilanz / Photo: Eyal Tuag
Alpha Wave is a provider of intellectual property for analog components, and works with Amazon among others. Banias’ signal processing component, based on optical electronics, may fill for AlphaWave and Amazon the processing (DSP) gaps they are looking for. Anforna Labs, founded by Vilanz together with Beshara and CEO Harvia Bilic, became a household name on Amazon, when it was recently announced that the chips produced by it generate revenues for the cloud giant of 5 billion dollars a year. Among the chips produced by Anforna: core processors for server chips, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
