Amazon, Google Israel supercomputer talks fail

Amazon and Google were not chosen to operate the Israeli supercomputer. The Israel Innovation Authority, which has been in talks with the two tech giants about building the supercomputer, yesterday issued a call for proposals for other companies to submit bids of up to NIS 290 million, and receive a grant of NIS 160 million.

The Innovation Authority tried to persuade Amazon and the Google employee to bid by virtue of being the winners of the government cloud tender Nimbus. Globes learned that Google concluded that the tender had no economic value at this stage and did not proceed to the subsequent stages of the tender. Amazon obviously competed but was not selected for various reasons.

According to the Innovation Authority’s requirements, the winning bidder will build a supercomputer – a collection of interconnected computing servers that together perform calculations that simple computers find difficult to do – and which contains at least a thousand advanced graphics accelerators from Nvidia. Or Intel or AMD.

Not necessarily related to Nvidia, the Innovation Authority allows franchisees to purchase not only H100 t processors, the famous accelerator from Nvidia, but also Gaudi 3 from Intel or MI300X from AMD.

Supercomputers are capable of performing calculations that simple computers or servers have difficulty doing — such as calculating drug development formulas, simulating a nuclear test, or 3D imaging an urban environment to train self-driving cars. The supercomputer will serve Israeli academia and the local technology industry.

Another supercomputer is already operating in Israel, Nvidia’s Israel 1, but it is still limited to internal operations only, although it may open its doors to the industry within the next year.

The innovation body now hopes that additional entities such as cloud providers or server farm owners will take up the challenge. It’s possible that companies like Oracle and Microsoft, which failed to win the Nimbus cloud tender, will find themselves competing for this much smaller government tender. Server farm operators such as Med1, Server Farm or Sheinfeld Engineering may also respond to the challenge.

Published by Globes, Israel Business News – en.globes.co.il – on December 30, 2024

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