NVIDIA Invests $500 Million in Advanced AI Supercomputer Facility in Israel

NVIDIA stuffs $500 million worth of Blackwell GPUs into 10,000 square-meter facility

TL;DR: NVIDIA plans to invest around $500 million in a supercomputer facility powered by Blackwell technology, located in Yokne'am, Israel. NVIDIA is planning to spend half a billion dollars on a new supercomputer facility for research and development purposes. The new facility will be powered by the company's latest Blackwell AI GPUs. According to reports, the new facility measures approximately 10,000 square meters and is located in Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park near the city of Yokne'am. The new facility will be filled with thousands of liquid-cooled Blackwell GPUs, along with BlueField-3 SuperNIC, Spectrum-X800, and Quantum-X800 switches. As for the purpose of the facility, reports indicate NVIDIA employees will use it to conduct research and development on datacenter technologies that will likely increase efficiency and performance. NVIDIA didn't reveal the total number of GPUs, but what we do know is the facility will be home to enough Blackwell GPUs that it will rival Israel's "Israel-1" supercomputer, which consists of 2,048 H100 AI GPUs. For those that don't know, NVIDIA touts Blackwell's performance as 2.5x the floating-point performance of Hopper, the previous generation of AI GPUs. Moreover, Blackwell will provide 5x performance when dropping down to 4-bit precision. Construction for this new facility has already begun, with reports indicating it will be complete sometime in the first half of 2025 and operations to start during the same period.

Nvidia to plow $500M into Israeli R&D cluster

System to feature hundreds of liquid-cooled Blackwell systems Nvidia is constructing a 30-megawatt research-and-development supercomputer stuffed with its latest-generation Blackwell GPUs in northern Israel at an estimated cost of half a billion dollars. The cluster's home is a 10,000-square-metre facility located in the Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park near the city of Yokne'am Illit. And according to Nvidia, it will be pack hundreds of Nv's liquid-cooled Blackwell-based systems, BlueField-3 SuperNIC, Spectrum-X800, and Quantum-X800 switches. We understand the big beast will be used by Nvidia employees to develop next-gen datacenter technologies. The exact number of accelerators being deployed isn't clear -- Nvidia has several liquid-cooled Blackwell reference systems with varying numbers of accelerators on board -- however, Israeli media reports the full configuration will feature "several thousand" GPUs rivaling the nation's Israel-1 supercomputer. That system is made up of 2,048 H100 accelerators stitched together using Nvidia's Ethernet-based Spectrum-X family of switches and superNICs to provide peak FP64 performance of 69 (vector) to 137 (matrix) petaFLOPS for scientific workloads or 8 exaFLOPS for AI applications (sparse FP8). On a chip-for-chip basis, Blackwell promises up to 2.5x the floating-point performance of Hopper at most precisions, and up to 5x when dropping down to 4-bit precision. In addition to the higher computational performance, Blackwell also promises between 1.66x and 2.38x higher memory bandwidth compared to its predecessor. So even with an equal number of accelerators as Israel-1, the new facility should translate into a more powerful system. System building is said to have begun sometime last year and is expected to start operations in the first half of 2025. Depending on how far along Nvidia is and just how many GPUs it plans to deploy, the chipmaker could just about potentially run afoul of the Biden administration's latest round of export controls on AI accelerators. As we saw with xAI's Colossus AI supercomputer, Nvidia and its partners have proven more than capable of deploying massive systems in a matter of months. Under the rules disclosed on Monday, Israel would be labeled a tier-two nation and be subject to import caps equivalent to 50,000 advanced GPUs over a two-year period between 2025 and 2027. However, it's our understanding that these rules won't go into effect for 120 days from publication, and may not survive a Trump presidency. If the president-elect's administration does move forward with these plans, the implementation period could give Nvidia enough time to complete any remaining shipments necessary to finish the cluster. It's also possible the super may slip under the export caps or be excluded from the rules as it's believed the computer will be used exclusively for internal research-and-development purposes. Under the rules, chip orders with a collective computational power of up to around 1,700 advanced GPUs would not require a special license from Uncle Sam and would not count against a nation's chip caps. Meanwhile, entities in tier-one nations that meet US security standards can place up to seven percent of their global computation in other nations around the world. Given Israel's strong ties to the US, there's a good chance the nation would be granted "National Verified End User" status, boosting the import cap to 320,000 accelerators over a two-year period. Even still, the rules have become a source of major concern for Israeli tech companies, which worry the rules could eliminate Israel's ability to compete in the emerging AI field. ®

NVIDIA to build new data center facility in Israel

Technology giant NVIDIA announced on Wednesday that it will expand its research and development operation in Israel and build a new research and engineering data center facility. The facility will include 10,000 square meters of AI data center infrastructure, and will be among the largest and most powerful data center labs in Israel, the company said. The facility will go into production in the first half of 2025, the company said, adding that the company's product and engineering teams will use it to develop "next-generation data center technologies - networking hardware and software technologies, CPU design, AI software, and more." The facility will be powered by hundreds of liquid-cooled Blackwell and Grace Blackwell Superchip-based systems, BlueField-3 SuperNIC, Spectrum-X800, and Quantum-X800 switches. Driving AI "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," said Senior Vice President of Software Engineering and NVIDIA Israel Site Leader Amit King. "Employees are our most valuable asset, and we are committed to continue our investment in them," he said. Sign up for the Business & Innovation Newsletter >>