Nvidia to Build $500m Supercomputer in Israel

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Nvidia is investing half a billion dollars to construct a 30-megawatt research-and-development supercomputer powered by its cutting-edge Blackwell GPUs in northern Israel.

The system will reside in a 10,000-square-metre facility within the Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park near Yokne’am Illit. Nvidia plans to pack the cluster with hundreds of liquid-cooled Blackwell-based systems, along with BlueField-3 SuperNICs, Spectrum-X800, and Quantum-X800 switches. The supercomputer will be used by Nvidia employees to advance next-generation datacenter technologies.

While Nvidia hasn’t disclosed the exact number of accelerators being deployed, Israeli media reports suggest the system will feature “several thousand” GPUs, rivaling the country’s Israel-1 supercomputer. That system boasts 2,048 H100 accelerators, delivering up to 137 petaFLOPS (matrix FP64) for scientific workloads and 8 exaFLOPS for AI applications (sparse FP8).

Blackwell GPUs promise up to 2.5x the floating-point performance of Hopper at most precisions and up to 5x at 4-bit precision. Memory bandwidth improvements range from 1.66x to 2.38x compared to Hopper. Even with a similar number of accelerators, Nvidia’s new system should outperform Israel-1.

Construction reportedly began last year, with operations expected to start in the first half of 2025.

US Export Rules Could Complicate Nvidia’s Plans

Nvidia’s ambitious project might run into challenges posed by the Biden administration’s new export controls on advanced AI hardware. Under these rules, Israel is classified as a tier-two nation, limiting it to importing 50,000 advanced GPUs over a two-year period starting in 2025.

However, the rules won’t take effect for 120 days and might face changes under a potential Trump presidency. If implemented, Nvidia could leverage the grace period to ship the remaining hardware for the project.

There’s also a possibility the system could sidestep the caps entirely, as it’s reportedly intended for internal R&D purposes. Current export rules allow shipments equivalent to 1,700 advanced GPUs without a special license, and Israel may receive a “National Verified End User” designation, boosting its cap to 320,000 GPUs over two years.

Even so, the export controls have sparked concerns among Israeli tech firms, which worry the restrictions could undermine their ability to compete in the AI industry.

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