AWS Swallows NeuroBlade

Once again, silently, AWS just made a new acquisition, this time with NeuroBlade Inc., an Israeli company dedicated to analytics.

Founded in 2018 with a total of $110.4 million of funding, NeuroBlade has developed and was a key designer and promoter of a SQL Processing Unit (SPU). Even confidential except for specialists, the solution really boosts results by a factor from 4 to 10x over CPUs.

But they never really took off with very limited visibility and market adoption. By some aspects, it reminds me the trajectory of offload processing card players like Annapurna Labs, Exar, Eiditicom, Fungible, Kalray, Nebulon, Pensando or even Swarm64 to list a few. Some other players try to remain independent, shifting to offer some AI oriented functions and services. On the network part, the Mellanox acquisition by Nvidia really confirmed the domain but also put a real pressure on it. In other words, is there really a place outside of it? Except for players who had since day 1 an exit plan with AWS, Nvidia or a few others.

It also appears to be a natural move for both companies as they partnered for quite some time with the NeuroBlade offering integrated and validated into AWS EC2 F2 instances. This partnership marks a key milestone and recognition for NeuroBlade. And such an opportunity has to be secured rapidly when it arises.

From various sources, the deal is estimated to be lower than the funding the company raised. As NeuroBlade core engineering team will join Annapurna Labs engineering entity in Israel within AWS, it’s worth mentioning that Annapurna Labs, an other Israeli company, was acquired by AWS in 2015 for approximately $350 million. The idea is to build a new AI chip product.

In the article posted in December 2024, we clearly wrote that we have some doubts on the future of NeuroBlade as an independent company and finally we were right.

We’ll see how AWS will integrate and operate in this domain…