Chip giant Nvidia to invest more than $500m in new Israeli AI research data lab
10,000-square-meter facility in the north to be used by Nvidia’s engineering teams to develop AI technologies
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
US gaming and computer graphics giant Nvidia is further expanding its operations in Israel by investing more than $500 million into a new AI research and engineering center to be set up in the north of the country.
The facility, at the Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park near Yokne’am, will be among the “largest, most powerful data center labs in Israel,” Nvidia said in a statement on Wednesday. The 10,000 square-meter lab will support Nvidia’s R&D products and services being developed in Israel and will have an advanced AI data center infrastructure, with power capacity of up to 30-megawatt.
The center, which is expected to start operations in the first half of 2025, will be equipped with hundreds of Nvidia’s liquid-cooled server systems fitted with its newest and fastest AI Blackwell chips, alongside its data processing units including BlueField-3 SuperNIC, Spectrum-X800 and Quantum-X800, which were developed in Israel.
Nvidia said that the lab will be used by dozens of its engineering and product teams developing next-generation networking hardware and software technologies, as well as for CPU design that will help drive the AI revolution.
“Employees are our most valuable asset, and we are committed to continue our investment in them,” said Amit Krig, Nvidia’s Israel site manager and SVP of software engineering and. “The new research and engineering data center facility will empower Nvidia Israel’s existing teams and many new hires to continue developing technologies that drive AI, the most important technological force of our time.”
Nvidia’s R&D activities in Israel are already the firm’s largest outside of the US. At the end of December, the chipmaker announced the completion of the acquisition of Israeli AI workload management startup Run:ai for an estimated $700 million. It marked Nvidia’s largest acquisition in the country since buying Israel’s Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a maker of high-speed servers and storage switching solutions used in supercomputers globally, for a massive $7 billion in 2020.
At the end of 2023, Nvidia launched Israel-1, which the chipmaker said was the nation’s most powerful generative AI cloud supercomputer based on a new locally developed high-performance Ethernet platform.
The firm, which employs over 4,500 workers in Israel in seven R&D centers, from Yokne’am, the headquarters of Mellanox, to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ra’anana, and Beersheba in the south, said that it has hundreds of open positions.