Intel will acquire Israeli autonomous driving technology provider Mobileye for $15 billion under an agreement announced March 13 that brings the Silicon Valley chipmaker into the emerging autonomous-driving sector.

Intel will spend $63.54 per share in cash for Jerusalem-based Mobileye, which specializes in collision detection and mapping technology. Santa Clara-based Intel will bring to bear its expertise to create automated cloud-based driving solutions.

Together the companies will combine efforts around connectivity, computer vision, data center, sensor fusion, high-performance computing, localization and mapping, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

With the merger, Intel will combine its Automated Driving Group with Mobileye. The new organization will be based in Israel and led by Amnon Shashua, Mobileye’s co-founder, chairman and CTO. Doug Davis, Intel's senior vice president, will oversee the combined organization’s engagement across Intel’s business groups. He will report to Shashua.

The organization will support both companies’ existing production programs and build upon relationships with automotive OEMs, Tier-1 suppliers and semiconductor partners to develop advanced driving assist, highly autonomous and fully autonomous driving programs.

The market for vehicle systems, data, and services supporting autonomous driving could reach $70 billion by 2030, according to an Intel estimate. By 2020, automated vehicles should generate 4,000 GB per day.

Intel and Mobileye began collaborating in July under a three-way partnership with BMW to develop a fleet of 40 autonomous vehicles by the second half of 2017 using Intel's GO solution and Mobileye's EyeQ5.

The Intel GO solution offers a platform for functions such as sensor fusion, driving policy, environment modeling, path planning and decision making. Mobileye’s EyeQ5 is responsible for processing and interpretation of input from the 360-degree surround view vision sensors as well as localization.

Mobileye formed a partnership with Delphi Automotive in August to develop a fully autonomous vehicle system by 2019. Mobileye ended its partnership with Tesla in July following a high-profile traffic fatality in May.