Nvidia Invests $500 Million in Israeli Supercomputer Project

Nvidia is set to invest $500 million in the construction of a powerful new supercomputer in northern Israel, featuring its advanced Blackwell GPUs. This ambitious project is aimed at significantly boosting research and development efforts within the region.

The supercomputer will be housed in a substantial 10,000-square-metre facility located in the Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park, near Yokne'am Illit. According to Nvidia, the facility will accommodate hundreds of cutting-edge, liquid-cooled systems based on the Blackwell architecture, as well as other components like the BlueField-3 SuperNIC, Spectrum-X800, and Quantum-X800 switches.

Nvidia employees will utilize this supercomputer for developing next-generation data center technologies. While the precise number of accelerators planned for deployment remains undisclosed, reports suggest the configuration could include several thousand GPUs, potentially surpassing Israel's current standout supercomputer, the Israel-1.

The Israel-1 supercomputer itself comprises 2,048 H100 accelerators linked to Nvidia's Ethernet-based Spectrum-X family of switches and SuperNICs. This setup enables peak double-precision floating-point performance between 69 and 137 petaFLOPS for scientific tasks, and an impressive 8 exaFLOPS for AI-related functions.

Blackwell technology is noted to offer up to 2.5 times the floating-point performance of Nvidia's earlier Hopper architecture across various precision levels, and potentially up to five times the performance when utilizing lower precision (4-bit). Additionally, Blackwell facilitates a memory bandwidth improvement of between 1.66 to 2.38 times compared to its predecessor, suggesting that even with a comparable number of accelerators as Israel-1, the new supercomputer promises to deliver superior overall performance.

The assembly of this large supercomputer is reportedly already underway and it is anticipated to begin operational status in the first half of 2025.

Concerns Regarding Export Rules

Nvidia's timing regarding this project may intersect with new export regulations from the Biden administration that impact AI accelerators. Depending on the progress made and the total number of GPUs planned for deployment, there's a chance that Nvidia might encounter complications under these new rules.

Recently, cases like xAI's Colossus AI supercomputer have demonstrated Nvidia's capability to rapidly install massive systems. Under the latest export guidelines, Israel is categorized as a tier-two nation, facing an import cap of 50,000 advanced GPUs over a two-year window from 2025 to 2027.

Interestingly, these regulations will not take effect for 120 days following their announcement, which provides a potential window for Nvidia to complete any necessary shipments to finalize the supercomputer setup.

Moreover, there remains a possibility that Nvidia's supercomputer might avoid these export restrictions since it is expected to be used solely for internal research and development purposes. Notably, orders involving a collective computational power of around 1,700 advanced GPUs would not necessitate special licensing and thus wouldn't count against the chip import limits.

In comparison, tier-one countries that adhere to U.S. security standards have the allowance to place a maximum of seven percent of their global computing resources in other countries.

Given Israel's strong ties to the United States, it is plausible that the country could achieve "National Verified End User" status, which would enhance the import cap to 320,000 accelerators over a two-year span.

However, the implications of these export rules have led to notable concern among Israeli technology firms, worried that such limitations could hinder the country’s ability to compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Nvidia, investment, supercomputer