The number of Mobileye shares to be offered and the price
range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined, Intel said.
The chip giant announced in December that it intends to take
Mobileye, a world leader in self-driving technologies, public this year at a
valuation of approximately $50 billion. Intel bought Israel’s Mobileye in 2017
for over $15 billion, a transaction that remains the largest exit for an
Israeli tech company to date.
Intel said making Mobileye a public company would “unlock the
value of Mobileye for Intel shareholders by creating a separate publicly traded
company and will build on Mobileye’s successful track record and serve its
expanded market.”
The multinational said it will remain the majority owner of
Mobileye, and the two companies will continue working together as they “pursue
the growth of computing in the automotive sector.”
The Mobileye executive team will remain in place, with
co-founder Amnon Shashua continuing as the company’s CEO.
Moovit, the Israeli transit tech company Intel bought in
2020 for $900 million, and internal teams working on self-driving technologies
will become “aligned as part of Mobileye,” Intel said in December.
The acquisition of Moovit enabled Intel to tap into a huge
amount of data regarding transportation and transit in cities around the world,
as Mobileye seeks to become a complete mobility provider, offering robotaxi
services. Mobileye and Moovit generate complementary data: the data that
Mobileye generates relates to vehicles, while Moovit generates data about
people on the move.
“Intel’s acquisition of Mobileye has been a great success,”
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said at the time.
Gelsinger said he and Shashua came to the conclusion that
“an IPO provides the best opportunity to build on Mobileye’s track record for
innovation and unlock value for shareholders.”
Founded in 1999, Mobileye went public in 2014 on the New
York Stock Exchange before being acquired by Intel.
The Jerusalem unit now plays a key role in Intel’s global
operations. Intel is set to open a new $400 million R&D facility for
Mobileye as it becomes the US giant’s hub for developing autonomous vehicle
technologies.
“Mobileye is a major growth business that’s deemed to be a
key part of Intel’s future,” the company has said.
Separately, Mobileye also has a number of running
partnerships to supply self-driving systems to California delivery startup
Udelv, which plans to have a fleet of autonomous delivery vehicles on the roads
within two years, and with two French-based firms to jointly develop and deploy
commercial autonomous shuttles for public transportation services in Europe in
2023.
Last month, Mobileye announced that it was partnering with
two mobility firms to develop and deploy self-driving, fully electric shuttles
in the US in 2024.
In February Intel also announced the forthcoming acquisition
of Israeli firm Tower Semiconductor, a chip and semiconductor manufacturer
based in Migdal HaEmek, for $5.4 billion.
Tower makes analog semiconductor chips for the consumer,
industrial, automotive, mobile, infrastructure, medical, aerospace, and defense
sectors.
The purchase will boost Intel’s semiconductor manufacturing
abilities to meet demand from global customers, the chipmaker giant said.
Intel has three major development centers in Israel — in
Haifa, Petah Tikva and Jerusalem — tasked with some of the company’s major
processor operations, and an advanced chip manufacturing plant in Kiryat Gat,
which is expanding. The company is also building a second $200 million campus
in Haifa to develop the “chips of the future.”
Intel has also bought Israeli company Screenovate, a
developer of beaming and mirroring solutions for mobile devices, last December,
as well as artificial chipmaker Habana Labs in 2019. It acquired Replay
Technologies, a developer of 3D reconstruction technologies for large-scale
sports events, in 2106, but shut it down in 2021.