In a year of war, Nvidia overtakes Microsoft as best firm to work for in Israel: D&B
2024 ranking by Dun & Bradstreet takes into account the impact of Gaza conflict on company operations and employees, finds workers seek stable workplace and career development
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
Chipmaker giant Nvidia has overtaken Microsoft as the best tech firm to work for in Israel, a new annual ranking by business analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet Israel released on Wednesday shows.
Nvidia Israel moved up to the number one spot from eighth place last year. The chipmaker pushed Microsoft Israel’s R&D Center into second place after the latter held the title for five years in a row. Workplace management platform Monday.com maintained its third place in the ranking from last year.
“What moved Nvidia’s position is on the one hand its success as a business and its developments in AI and on the other hand how the firm mobilized to adapt to the war situation and give back to the community putting the focus on the support of employees and importance of human capital,” D&B Israel’s head of high-tech Yael Belgrai Cohen told The Times of Israel. “In this challenging war year and in light of the fear of layoffs, we are seeing that stability in the workplace, as well as professional and career development, are the most important criteria for high-tech employees.”
Nvidia is among the international tech giants that have expanded their presence in Israel since launching its first operations in the country in 2016 and opening an AI research center two years later. Its activities in Israel are already the firm’s largest outside of the US, where the chipmaker employs about 4,000 workers in seven R&D centers, including Yokne’am, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ra’anana and Beersheba.
During the war period, Nvidia alongside its employees raised funds to donate to nonprofit organizations that are supporting Israeli and Gazan civilians affected by the war.
The fighting erupted in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 onslaught when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern communities in Israel, killing 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and abducting 251. Among the kidnapped is one of Nvidia’s employees, electrical engineer Avinatan Or, who is still believed to be in Hamas captivity in Gaza.
The US chipmaker in April bought Israeli AI workload management startup Run:ai. The deal is estimated to be Nvidia’s biggest acquisition in Israel since the US chipmaker bought Mellanox Technologies Ltd. in 2020 for $6.9 billion.
Due to the ongoing war, Israel continues to call up hundreds of thousands of reservists, many of whom are working in local tech companies, which is leading to a shortage of key personnel, disruptions in operations and a halt to projects.
“Israeli high-tech has been in much uncertainty during the last two years, which in turn is testing the strength and stability of the companies every time anew,” said Belgrai Cohen.
“The coming period in the high-tech industry will continue to be challenging. We will probably continue to see a decline in business activity, difficulty in raising capital, budgetary cuts and layoffs,” she added.
The high-tech industry entered a period of significant decline in investments since the middle of 2022 as part of global trends, which slowed down globally during 2023, but they deepened in Israel as a result of the proposed judicial reform and the war that followed the end of last year.
In fourth place in D&B’s annual ranking came US cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks founded by American-Israeli entrepreneur Nir Zuk, dropping from the second spot in 2023. Salesforce rounded up the top five slipping one spot from last year. SAP R&D center Israel and Panaya took sixth and seventh place, respectively, from fifth and tenth last year, and Autodesk Israel ranked eighth, up from 12th in 2023.
Appsflyer ranked ninth, unchanged from last year, while Cyberark Software made a first entry and ranked 10th.
Intel, one of the country’s largest employers, dropped four spots to 18th place in the ranking. That’s as the US chipmaker is reportedly laying off a few hundred employees at its development centers in Haifa, Petah Tikva and Jerusalem as part of a global move to cut 15% of its global workforce.
As part of streamlining measures, Intel also said that it is shutting down the operations of Israeli cloud computing tech startup Granulate, which it bought back in 2022 for $650 million. In June, Intel announced that it was halting a major factory project in Israel, which was planned to pour an extra $15 billion toward the expansion of its chip manufacturing plant in Kiryat Gat, in the south of the country.
“There are a lot of question marks around what will happen to R&D centers in Israel,” D&B cautioned in the report. “There is also concern about whether we will see an exit of international companies from Israel and whether the decline in the number of newly established startups will continue.”
The D&B ranking selects the 50 best high-tech companies to work for in 2024 employing over 47,000 employees in Israel.