Mobileye Lays Cornerstone For New Global Development Center In Jerusalem

Israel’s autonomous driver assistance company Mobileye, an Intel company, laid the cornerstone for its new global development center in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

The cornerstone itself was laid by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a ceremony that included Economy Minister Eli Cohen, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion, and Mobileye President and CEO Professor Amnon Shashua.

The global development center, designed by architect Moshe Tzur, is expected to open in October 2022. Once completed, the eight-story development center will span 50,000 square meters above ground and 78,000 square meters underground. It will also house 56 meeting rooms and laboratories over 1,400 square meters.

The center is expected to employ some 2,700 people.

“The largest investment in the history of the State of Israel is underway,” Cohen wrote on social media. “An investment that will propel the Israeli economy and Jerusalem forward, and add lots of jobs.”

“This is a very big thing and it’s also a great day for the State of Israel because we are in the midst of a major revolution,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying at the ceremony by the Jerusalem Post. The revolution is changing the global economy at a pace and dramatic manner that we have not witnessed since we started tracking the history of economics.”

Mobileye, a developer of cutting-edge autonomous driving tech and advanced driver assistance systems, was acquired by chipmaker giant Intel in March 2017 for $15.3 billion, marking the largest acquisition of an Israeli company to date.

Founded in 1999 by Ziv Avram and Shashua, the Hebrew University professor who also now holds a senior vice president position at Intel, Mobileye went public in 2014 with the highest IPO (initial public offering) in Israel at the time. In 2016, Mobileye and Intel became part of an autonomous vehicle project with BMW Group to bring autonomous vehicles at Level 3 (highly automated driving) and Level 4/5 (fully automated driving) to market by 2021.

Chinese tech giant Baidu announced it was teaming with Intel to integrate Jerusalem-based Mobileye tech into its autonomous vehicle platform in July 2018. In October 2018, German auto giant Volkswagen joined forces with Mobileye to deploy Israel’s first driverless, electric ride-sharing service.