Amazon to buy Israeli start-up Annapurna Labs

SAN FRANCISCO/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. tech giant Amazon confirmed on Thursday that it has agreed to buy Israeli chipmaker Annapurna Labs for its cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services. An AWS spokeswoman declined to discuss the terms of the deal, but financial newspaper Calcalist reported earlier on Thursday that Amazon would pay up to $370 million. Annapurna Labs is owned by businessman Avigdor Willenz with other investors including British chip designer ARM and venture capital firm Walden International, the newspaper said. The Israeli paper added that the proposal includes an agreement by Amazon to open a research and development centre in Israel. The Israeli start-up, which Calcalist said has raised several tens of millions of dollars in private funding, was not reachable for comment. (Reporting by Deepa Seetharama in San Francisco and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem; Editing by Steven Scheer and David Goodman)