Intel is acquiring Israel-based Granulate Cloud Solutions in a deal reportedly worth $650 million.

Granulate develops real-time continuous optimization software. The acquisition will help cloud and data center customers maximize compute workload performance, and reduce infrastructure and cloud costs.

According to TechCrunch, Intel is shelling out $650 million for Granulate.

The transaction should wrap in the second quarter of 2022, subject to typical closing conditions. At that time, Granulate’s 120 employees will integrate with Intel’s data center and artificial intelligence (AI) business unit.

Greg Lavender is chief technology officer, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s software and advanced technology group.

Intel’s Greg Lavender

“We are building our portfolio of software optimization tools that offer flexible and scalable capabilities that allow us to meet the growing demand of the ubiquitous compute era,” he said. “Granulate’s innovative approach to real-time optimization software complements Intel’s existing capabilities by helping customers realize performance gains, cloud cost reductions and continual workload learning.”

Intel, Granulate Partnering Since 2019

Intel and Granulate began working together in late 2019. Granulate was part of the first graduating class of Intel Ignite, the startup accelerator program that taps into Intel’s resources to help early-stage companies succeed.

Over the past year, Intel and Granulate have worked together under a commercial agreement to collaborate on workload optimization on Xeon deployments. This collaboration resulted in gains in performance and decreases in costs for customers running on Intel processors.

Intel will scale Granulate’s optimization software, including across its data center portfolio. Intel is investing in growth opportunities enabled by software. That includes end-to-end AI and security platforms, services and APIs.

Asaf Ezra is Granulate‘s co-founder and CEO.

Granulate’s Asaf Ezra

“Together with Intel, we believe we can help customers achieve meaningful cost reductions and five times the throughput across workloads,” he said  “As a part of Intel, Granulate will be able to deliver autonomous optimization capabilities to even more customers globally and rapidly expand its offering with the help of Intel’s 19,000 software engineers.”