US chip giant Intel is closing down its agentic and inference optimization research laboratories in Israel and laying off its 13 employees, "Globes" has learned. The reasoning given internally by the company for closing the activity focuses on organizational considerations based on geographical location.
Intel declined to comment on the matter or elaborate on the nature of the decision, so it is possible that it involves consolidating activities taking place far from each other or a desire to concentrate more activities in other countries. In recent years, Intel has reduced its workforce in Israel by about 25% out of about 12,000 employees, in line with job cuts of a similar rate worldwide.
However, while construction of its new plants in Israel has been frozen, the company has continued to invest major resources in hiring employees in India and the US and upgrading a factory in Ireland. Despite these steps, according to sources close to the company, Intel continues to hire employees for more than a hundred open positions in Israel.
Closing the Israel AI research lab is an unusual step that goes against the prevailing trend in the industry. Global tech giants are in an aggressive arms race and are intensively hiring researchers and developers in the fields of AI, AI agents and optimization. But Intel, under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, is choosing to cut back on the Israeli workforce that is leading these developments.
A decade of groundbreaking research cut short
The move comes amid a comprehensive streamlining and restructuring program led by Lip-Bu Tan at Intel to simplify the hierarchy and cut bureaucracy. As part of these changes, Intel recently cut more than half of its VPs from about 450 to only about 200, while at the same time cutting the company's management layers from 12 to 6. Now, this wave of cuts and reorganization is also hitting the core of applied research in Israel.
The Israel AI lab was led by Moshe Waserblatt, a senior Intel executive. The team, which has operated for about a decade and brought together senior researchers in the fields of natural language processing and large language models, led, among other things, strategic collaborations with open source platforms such as Hugging Face. The researchers were also behind breakthroughs in accelerating inference times and reducing computing costs on Intel processors, developing independent research agents, internal organizational learning infrastructures and reinforcement learning models for mathematical reasoning, and published more than 50 articles in the world's leading academic journals.
The closure of the activity has resonated among senior executives in the global AI industry. Senior executives at companies such as Meta, Microsoft and Hugging Face, along with officials within Intel itself, expressed great astonishment, especially because of the Israeli group's technological activity for the global AI community.
No response has been forthcoming from Intel.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 2, 2026.
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