Astera Labs announced Monday that it is expanding its global engineering operations with the opening of a new research and development design center in Israel, a move aimed at accelerating work on advanced connectivity solutions for large-scale artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The semiconductor company said the Israel center will focus on developing next-generation scale-up fabrics for high-bandwidth connectivity protocols, while also advancing research to address data, network and memory bottlenecks in AI training and inference systems.
Guy Azrad, a veteran semiconductor executive, will lead the new operation as senior vice president of engineering and general manager of Astera Labs Israel. He will be joined by Ido Bukspan, who was named vice president of ASIC engineering.
Astera Labs said the expansion reflects a strategic investment in Israel’s semiconductor ecosystem and is intended to create an end-to-end R&D facility capable of supporting the company’s growing AI connectivity platform. The company plans to collaborate with Israeli universities and the local venture ecosystem as part of the initiative.
“We’re building an engineering team with a strong focus on execution, covering hardware, silicon, and software solutions, to support the growing adoption of Astera Labs’ Intelligent Connectivity Platform,” Azrad said. “With offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa, the new Israel design center will look to tap into the region's world-class engineering talent to focus on the full chip design flow—from architecture through production, including software and system design for cutting-edge AI fabrics and emerging inference applications.”
Azrad brings extensive experience in high-speed networking, compute and Ethernet technologies. He most recently served as vice president of chip design engineering at Google, where he led silicon development for compute applications. Before that, he held senior leadership roles at Marvell, including senior vice president of its global Ethernet switching division, overseeing networking products deployed across data centers worldwide.
Astera Labs said Azrad has led the development of multiple generations of high-performance networking system-on-chips and has built large-scale chip design organizations across multiple geographies.
The Israel expansion is further reinforced by the appointment of Bukspan, who brings more than two decades of experience in networking and semiconductor design. He previously spent over 20 years at Mellanox Technologies and NVIDIA, where he rose to senior vice president of chip design and led development of InfiniBand, Ethernet and NVLink solutions used in modern data centers and AI systems.
Most recently, Bukspan served as CEO of Pliops, a data acceleration company focused on key-value cache technologies.
“Israel has been defining networking innovation for decades, from those formative years when we were proving what was possible to today's AI-driven transformation,” Bukspan said. “I see the same drive, the same intensity to deliver highly performant connectivity solutions at Astera Labs. Together, we're taking AI connectivity to the next level. Come join us.”
Astera Labs said the Israel design center will support its Intelligent Connectivity Platform, which integrates CXL, Ethernet, NVLink Fusion, PCIe and UALink semiconductor technologies with its COSMOS software suite to deliver scalable AI infrastructure.
The company said it is actively recruiting engineers for the new center, with positions based in Tel Aviv and Haifa.