Nvidia is building one of the largest server farms in Israel, near the Elyakim Junction near Yokneam in the north of the country. The data center engineering facility will for the first time deploy Nvidia’s new Blackwell processors. Industry sources estimate the total investment in the project at more than $500 million.
The facility is located in a logistics building belonging to real estate company Shoval Investment and Management, which has been converted into a data center, in the Mevo Carmel Science and Industry Park between Eliakim and Kibbutz Ramat HaShofet. In its full configuration, the facility will consume 30 megawatt-hours, putting it on par with what is currently Israel’s largest data center, Schonfeld Engineering’s SDS server farm in Modi’in, which also consumes 30 megawatt-hours. For comparison’s sake, the power consumption of Amazon’s three server farms in Israel is 12 megawatt-hours each.
The new Blackwell processors that will be installed in NVIDIA’s data center are graphics processors with computing power four times more powerful than the processors in the company’s Israel 1 supercomputer for training artificial intelligence models, and thirty times more powerful for artificial intelligence inference tasks. The facility will not only house and cool servers, but will also contain development laboratories and offices. As far as is known, it will only serve Nvidia’s needs, and will not host data for external entities.
The Mevo Carmel Industrial Zone is owned by four local authorities: Yokneam Illit, Daliat al-Carmel, Isfiya, and the Megiddo Regional Council.
Built in less than a year
The new site was built in less than a year and will become operational in the first half of this year, supporting the expansion of Nvidia’s R&D activity in Israel.
It is believed the server farm will be equipped with several thousand of the most advanced Blackwell and Grace Blackwell processors, along with Nvidia Israel Spectrum, DGX Quantum, BlueField and SuperNIC telecoms processors, in the largest concentration in Israel. The new facility will be more powerful in its computing and processing capabilities than the Nvidia Israel 1 supercomputer, which last November became the 34th most powerful computer in the world. Israel 1 houses more than 2,000 of Nvidia’s previous generation GPUs, the H100 and BlueField, and is located at the company’s offices in Yokneam.
Systems and laboratories at the new site will serve dozens of Nvidia’s engineering and product groups in developing new technologies – hardware and software technologies for accelerated communications, processor design, artificial intelligence software, and so on.
Nvidia confirmed the construction of the data center this morning. “Our employees are our most important resource, and we are committed to continuing to invest in them,” said Amit Craig, senior vice president of networking programs and site manager for Nvidia-Israel. “The new R&D and engineering site will enable thousands of Nvidia employees in Israel, and many more who will join later, to continue developing the technologies that drive artificial intelligence, the most important technological force of our time.”
Published by Globes, Israel Business News – en.globes.co.il – on January 15, 2025.
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