Google, Amazon set to compete in tender for Israel’s AI supercomputing platform

Leading technology companies Google and Amazon will compete in a closed tender to provide data infrastructure for Israel’s supercomputer, aimed at equipping the high-tech industry and academia with faster computational power to train large artificial intelligence models.

The tender, led by the Israel Innovation Authority, which is in charge of setting out the nation’s tech policy, is part of the NIS 1 billion ($266 million) National AI Program, geared to help Israel maintain and strengthen its position as a global leader in light of the fast-evolving technology.

“We want Israeli companies to push for this big revolution of AI by collecting relevant data, uploading them to the cloud, and start training them to get insights in order to supply services and new products,” Aviv Zeevi, head of the technology infrastructure division at the Israel Innovation Authority told The Times of Israel. “We don’t want Israeli companies to be delayed by the fact there is not enough infrastructure or it’s too costly for them to train the data.”

Supercomputers are next-generation machines that can process exponentially more data than classical computers with a number-crunching capability to perform calculations at blazingly fast speeds. They use a significant number of graphics processing units (GPUs) — which offer high processing and computational abilities that ordinary computers cannot achieve — to run complex simulations, address questions about nature and climate change, and develop new AI-driven technologies in areas from transportation and medicine to drug discovery.

Israel still ranks among the top 10 ecosystems for artificial intelligence, but it is far from unlocking the full potential of revolutionary technology as competition in the global AI race intensifies.

Over the past year, industry leaders and tech entrepreneurs have raised concerns that Israel is missing the AI wave and needs to implement a long-term strategy to allocate money and resources to boost education and academic research, encourage startups, and provide the infrastructure and computational power needed to run AI models.

The Israel Innovation Authority is concerned that the lack of local AI supercomputing infrastructure is limiting the Israeli high-tech industry’s competitive advantage. That’s as many governments worldwide are providing the needed supercomputing infrastructure to academia and local industry.

The forthcoming supercomputer with cloud-based access is intended to address this gap by making it available for researchers and companies at a reduced cost.

Aviv Zeevi, Vice President of the Technological Infrastructure Division at Israel Innovation Authority. (Hanna Teib)

“With this tender, we are targeting a very specific need for a GPUs-based platform,” said Zeevi. “We are hoping to build an infrastructure with at least 2000 GPUs, which are dedicated specifically for the training of AI models and will be accessible for the Israeli industry and academia, as the ones that already exist are either in specific companies like Intel or Nvidia, or accessible from outside of Israel.”

As part of the NIS 240 million ($64 million) government tender to build the supercomputing infrastructure, Google and Amazon will need to submit their proposals over the next two weeks. The Israel Innovation Authority is hoping to choose the winner of the tender in December and sign a contract at the beginning of next year.

Back in 2021, Google and Amazon were selected as the winners of a government tender to build and provide cloud-based regional data centers and services to local public entities as part of the Nimbus project.

Israel is home to about  9,000 startups, out of which more than 2,200 are AI-based tech firms in finance, healthcare, food, energy, agriculture, transportation, manufacturing and construction. With 73 startups, Israel ranks third in the world after the US and the UK in the field of firms developing generative AI technologies.