Google is expanding its chip development operations in Israel, "Globes" has learned, and is currently hiring dozens of employees to develop a new type of communications chip - a network interface card (NIC), a basic component for use in communications between core processors and graphics processors for AI processing. Such chips are currently produced by Broadcom, Intel and Nvidia.
An expensive commodity at a high price
Until recently, Google's development of a network card was considered a straightforward task, but the proliferation of AI processing operations has made the component critical for communications between graphics processors in large data centers. Its price has skyrocketed, and the "NIC" has become a valuable commodity, sold at particularly high prices by Nvidia as part of a suite of communications chips developed at Mellanox, the Israeli company that Nvidia acquired five years ago. Nvidia is trying to market its NIC components alongside other communications components in a seemingly discounted package deal, but the prices still make it difficult for tech giants to deploy AI technologies profitably.
Four years ago, Google opened its own chip development department in order to develop hardware components that would reduce its dependence on external suppliers such as Intel, Nvidia, and Broadcom.
Tech giants are now rushing to develop NICs after leading companies, such as OpenAI, for example, released specifications for developing a chip that can handle the processing tasks of the next generation of language model processing. Consequently, companies like Nvidia, Google and Amazon are competing to develop new NIC processors internally. Google has previously developed a NIC processor called TIN, but now it needs to adapt the component to an era where the bulk of processing tasks deal with large language models.
The Israelis behind the chip
Google has been developing its own chips for several years with assistance from Broadcom, but these efforts have focused mainly on the graphics accelerator core, in order to reduce dependence on Nvidia and AMD graphics processors. Google's graphics accelerator is called TPU, and Google has been using it for several years for extensive internal functions such as image recognition, language processing applications and AI. Google also buys graphics processors from Nvidia and even Intel, but its internal development efforts have increased to reduce dependence on external processors and increase its ability to adapt its hardware to the demands of its cloud customers.
Amazon made a similar move a decade ago when it acquired Annapurna Labs, an Israeli company based in Haifa, for $370 million, after it developed Nic. Amazon has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing additional chips based on Annapurna's activities, and today it includes a processor for cloud services (Graviton), a processor for AI training (Trinium) and a processor for AI inference (Infernasia). Google's chip development activity is believed to be smaller than that of Nvidia, and is managed, among others, by two Israelis: Uri Frank, former vice president at Intel; and Guy Azrad, former CEO of Marvell Israel.
Google's job website in Israel also has dozens of jobs in the field of central processing units (CPUs), processors used to manage tasks in servers and data centers, and which in the industry are usually sold by companies such as Intel and Nvidia.
Google has 140 electrical and software engineers in Haifa and Tel Aviv, according to LinkedIn, and is now hiring dozens more new engineers to develop the chip.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 4, 2025.
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