Annapurna Labs is an Israeli microelectronics company. Since January 2015 it has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.com. Amazon reportedly acquired the company for its Amazon Web Services division for US$350–370M. [1] [2]
Annapurna Labs, named after the Annapurna Massif in the Himalayas, was co-founded in 2011 [3] by Bilic "Billy" Hrvoje, a Bosnian Jewish refugee, Nafea Bshara, an Arab Israeli citizen, [4] [5] and Ronen Boneh with investments from the independent investors Avigdor Willenz, Manuel Alba, Andy Bechtolsheim, the venture capital firm Walden International, Arm Holdings, [6] and TSMC. Board members include Avigdor Willenz, Manuel Alba, and Lip-Bu Tan, the CEO of both Walden International and Cadence Design Systems. [7]
The first product launched under the AWS umbrella was the AWS Nitro hardware and supporting hypervisor in November 2017. [8] Following on from Nitro, Annapurna developed general-purpose CPUs under the Graviton family and machine-learning ASICs under the Trainium and Inferentia brands. [9] [10] [11]