US chip company Astera Labs (Nasdaq: ALAB) has announced that it is opening an advanced R&D center in Israel. The company, which is competing with Nvidia and Broadcom in AI data center infrastructure, will open design centers in Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Israeli semiconductor industry veteran Guy Azrad, SVP engineering and general manager of Astera Labs Israel, will lead the new Israel operations. Until six months ago Azrad was Google SVP engineering responsible for developing communications chips at Google Israel.
Astera Labs is a growing chip company that is currently traded on Nasdaq with a market cap of $28 billion, after the stock rebounded on Friday and rose 19%.
The share price has risen 62% over the past year, due to its revenue doubling every year and its aggressive product launches. Astera Labs also has Israeli connections as one of its early investors is serial chip entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz. Astera Labs competes with Broadcom and Nvidia by developing chips and communication protocols that enable the transfer of data between graphics processors and onto the core processors inside cloud and AI servers. Astera Labs rapid growth has been achieved by working with external customers, most of them cloud companies like Amazon and “Neo Cloud” clouds, which are interested in developing their own AI servers independently of Nvidia, and its rack-scale infrastructure product has become one of its most expensive products.
Astera Labs has not entered Israel through the acquisition of a company. In fact, its founders toured Israel looking to buy a local company, as companies like Amazon, Marvel, and Apple have done in the past, but settled instead on hiring the hardware engineers of Pliops, the Israeli data center storage chip company that was once considered a great promise, but failed to launch a successful product to the market.
About half of Pliops employees will move to Astra
According to estimates, out of about 120 Pliops employees, about 50% will move to Astera, including its electrical engineering staff. The software staff, will have to wait for a solution to be found for them at Pliops or find new jobs. According to estimates, Astera Labs paid only about $70 million for this employee deal. For investors in Pliops senior figures like Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and funds like Viola, Intel Capital, Koch, and State of Mind Ventures, this is an extremely low valuation for a company that had raised $210 million since its inception, and in its most recent round in 2022, it was valued at $650 million. The bulk of the capital will go to late investors, those who purchased preferred shares on favorable terms, such as GlenRock, for example, according to the PitchBook database.
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Pliops CEO Ido Bukspan will join Astera Labs as VP ASIC Engineering to support the company’s scale-up fabric development initiatives. Prior to June 2023 when he joined Pliops, he served as VP chip development at Nvidia Israel.
As part of its expansion plans in Israel, Astera Labs will establish offices near Tel Aviv based on part of Pliops offices in the Amot Tower in Ramat Gan, and in its existing offices in Haifa based on a local customer service center. The company hiring plans dozens of employees by the end of the year and hundreds by the end of 2027.
The company seeks hardware and chip development engineers (VLSI) with a specialization in data communications, with a profile similar to those working at companies like Nvidia (Mellanox), Google, Marvell, Broadcom, and Amazon, and trying to attract them with a stock package that has a higher growth potential than that of any other large company.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on February 9, 2026.
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