Element Labs

From Habana Labs to Element Labs: the same team, a new venture

Element Labs was founded in 2024 by Avigdor Willenz together with David Dahan and Ran Halutz, the three founders of Habana Labs, which was sold to Intel in 2019 for about $2 billion. In October 2025 Globes reported that Intel was shutting down Habana Labs' operations in Caesarea six years after the acquisition, and that the same trio had rented exactly the same office complex to build a new chip venture there, with about 200 employees at that point. Element Labs is, in a real sense, a direct continuation of an engineering team that had already worked together, not a start from scratch.

A barely known product: inference chips for server farms

Its declared field is hardware accelerators for server farms, with an emphasis on the inference stage: running a trained model on users' requests, the stage that carries most of the computing load once a model reaches the market. According to Globes, the processors are planned to be split between large data centers at remote sites and much smaller local data processing stations, close to population centers and businesses. So far the company has not published a full technical specification.

Unusually fast funding, before a commercial product

The company raised $50 million in early 2025 at a valuation of about $500 million, led by the American investment giant Fidelity and the fund Atreides, a long-time investor in Willenz's previous ventures. In June 2026, less than two years after it was founded and before any commercial product was shown, Globes reported another round from the same investors, at a valuation of more than $4 billion. Amounts like these at such an early stage reflect both the global shortage of practical alternatives to Nvidia and Willenz's personal reputation: three of the chip companies he founded in Israel have already been sold to American corporations.

A company that doesn't talk: no website, no interviews

Unlike most Israeli chip companies, Element Labs has no public website and no official social media page, and its executives do not give interviews to the media, a fact reported again and again in Globes and Calcalist articles about the company. Its official existence as a corporation can be verified only through the Israeli Registrar of Companies: according to a search of the Ministry of Justice's official database, Element Labs Ltd. (company number 516980356) is registered as a private Israeli company with active status.

What this says about the AI accelerator market

As of 2026 it is still hard to judge Element Labs by its products, since it has not presented a technical specification. What can be said is that it is part of a clear trend: after years in which the AI accelerator market was dominated almost entirely by a single player, investors are willing to put billions into any credible attempt to produce an alternative, even when the company refuses to talk to the media.